Abstract
Blood Center/Blood Hospital-Based Donor Center
Mindy Goldman, MD, FRCPC (she/her/hers)
Medical Director
Canadian Blood Services
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
In September, 2022 we removed the three month deferral for men who have sex with men and adopted gender neutral criteria assessing sexual risk behaviours. All allogeneic donors are asked if they have had a new partner or more than one sexual partner in the last 3 months. Donors answering yes to either question are asked if they had anal sex in the last 3 months; if yes, they are deferred for 3 months. We assessed the impact of these changes on HIV rates, risk factors in positive donors and donor deferral rates over 18 months post-implementation. Donor compliance was assessed by an anonymous donor survey.
Study
Design/Methods:
We followed HIV rates 18 months pre- and 18 months post implementation and interviewed HIV positive donors. We evaluated yes answers to sexual risk screening questions and performed an anonymous electronic donor survey of 39,853 donors (October 2023 to February 2024) who had recently successfully donated, oversampling first time donors. Data on donors, donations, transmissible disease markers and deferrals were extracted from our epidemiology database. Comparisons were made using the Chi square test.
Results/Findings:
There were 3 HIV positive donations out of 1,187,100 donations pre-implementation and 4 out of 1,184,784 post-implementation (0.25/100,000 vs 0.33/100,000, p= 0.73). Post-implementation HIV positive donors were male, one was non-compliant with multiple criteria, while no risk factors were identified in the other three, although one had language comprehension difficulties. On their first return after implementation of the new criteria, 2.9% of donors answered yes to a new partner and/or multiple partners in the last 3 months, 0.17% were deferred for a new or multiple partners and anal sex. 11,217 donors responded to the survey (28% response rate), 0.92% of males (55 out of 5,964 male respondents) and 0.57% of females (30 of 5,253 female respondents) answered yes to a new partner or more than one partner in the last 3 months and anal sex and were therefore likely non-compliant with the new criteria.
Conclusions:
Implementation of sexual risk behavior donor screening resulted in low, stable HIV rates during an 18 month observation period. Deferral rates on implementation were manageable and have since dropped further to approximately 0.06%. Non-compliance with the new criteria was less than 1% as assessed by an anonymous donor survey. To date, the safety and adequacy of the blood supply has been maintained, while increasing accessibility to donation.