MONTREAL, March 7 (UPI) -- Two Canadian agencies responsible for blood donations have ignored scientific appeals to accept blood from gay men, Montreal's Gazette newspaper reported.
Mark Wainberg and Norbert Gilmore, of Montreal's McGill University AIDS Center filed data with Hema-Quebec and Canadian Blood Services saying the nucleic acid test used to screen for HIV in donated blood is 10,000 times more sensitive than the serological tests used in the 1980s, when the gay donor ban went into force, the newspaper said.
Gilmore told a news conference on Thursday if the ban were lifted, the Canadian blood supply would gain about 136,000 additional donations each year from gay men.
However, Canadian Blood Services spokeswoman Anne Trueman said the group's board "just wasn't satisfied that all the science was in place" to make guarantees on blood safety, the newspaper said.
She said the nucleic acid test can still miss the presence of HIV in someone who was infected only two weeks earlier.
