Gobsmacked. That’s the only rational response to news that a) a private company plans to set up shop in Toronto to buy blood plasma and; b) it is perfectly legal for them to do so. Have we already forgotten the tainted-blood tragedy – a debacle that left more than 20,000 Canadians infected with HIV and […]
An Ontario-based company that pays people to donate blood plasma — a practice banned in two provinces — is set to make New Brunswick its next centre of operation, fuelling an ongoing ethical debate. Canadian Plasma Resources is looking to western and Atlantic provinces, including New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, after legislation in Ontario shuttered […]
There was an emotional call for the Gallant government to stop a privately-operated plasma collection from setting up in New Brunswick. “The plasma that is collected by a private blood broker will be exported out of Canada for sale. This is absolutely outrageous and it’s dangerous.” CPR is planning to open a privately run plasma […]
An Ontario-based company that pays people to donate blood plasma — a practice banned in two provinces — is set to make New Brunswick its next centre of operation, fuelling an ongoing ethical debate. Canadian Plasma Resources is looking to western and Atlantic provinces, including New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, after legislation in Ontario shuttered […]
Héma-Québec established PLASMAVIE to strengthen its own supply of plasma and reduce its reliance on imported products. The centre is dedicated exclusively to the collection of plasma via apheresis donation, a technique that takes only the desired components from a donor’s blood. Plasma can be donated every six days, and the procedure collects a greater […]
Héma-Québec’s mission is to efficiently provide adequate quantities of safe, optimal blood components, substitutes, human tissues and cord blood to meet the needs of all Quebecers; to provide and develop expertise along with specialized and innovative services and products in the fields of transfusion medicine and human tissue transplantation. Héma-Québec encompasses 1,300 employees, over 300,000 […]
“The tainted blood tragedy was a massive and deadly institutional failure but there were also some small acts of heroism that didn’t get recognized,” Globe and Mail public health reporter André Picard wrote in an e-mail. Mr. Picard is also author of The Gift of Death, a book about the tainted-blood scandal. “On a number […]
Héma-Québec a pour mission de répondre avec efficience aux besoins de la population québécoise en sang et ses dérivés, en tissus humains, en sang de cordon, en lait maternel et en produits cellulaires sécuritaires et de qualité optimale; développer et offrir une expertise et des services spécialisés et novateurs dans le domaine des produits biologiques […]
Héma-Québec a pour mission de répondre avec efficience aux besoins de la population québécoise en sang et ses dérivés, en tissus humains, en sang de cordon, en lait maternel et en produits cellulaires sécuritaires et de qualité optimale; développer et offrir une expertise et des services spécialisés et novateurs dans le domaine des produits biologiques […]
Blood is a sensitive topic in Canada, and rightly so. About 30,000 Canadians were unknowingly infected with HIV and hepatitis C during the 1980s from tainted blood and plasma they had been assured was safe. Thousands of lives were cut short. Infected blood, purchased from disreputable sources, including derelicts on U.S. skid rows, was at […]
Ontario is moving to slam the door shut on pay-for-blood clinics before they even open up for business. Health Minister Deb Matthews said Friday that proposed legislation will be introduced in early spring that will stop Canadian Plasma Resources from opening up shop in Toronto and Hamilton. “They haven’t started up business yet so that […]
If Ontario does allow the for-profit model, McCarthy worries it will open the floodgates for similar clinics in other provinces. “There’s almost a point of no return if we introduce this type of model into Ontario,” says McCarthy. “It will create huge pressures for other provinces to feel compelled to have to join in because […]
A union representing more than 13,000 Saskatchewan health care workers says human tissue should not be “turned into a commodity to be bought and sold.” The Canadian Union of Public Employees says private, for-profit blood donor clinics should be banned in Saskatchewan. CUPE Saskatchewan president Tom Graham says government should promote and expand the voluntary […]
Tainted blood survivors and activists joined NDP MPs in Ottawa Monday in demanding that federal Health Minister Jane Philpott close down Canada’s first private blood clinic and refrain from allowing more to open. At a press conference on Parliament Hill, Mike McCarthy, a former vice president of the Canadian Hemophilia Society and a tainted blood […]
A group that advocates for public health care is seeing red over concerns pay-for-plasma clinics could set up in the province. The Nova Scotia Citizens’ Health Care Network sent a letter Monday to provincial health minister Leo Glavine expressing concerns and urging the province to pass legislation that would ban the sale of blood and […]
The current controversy in Nova Scotia about paying donors for blood has been fraught with misinformation. The public deserves to know the truth about what is happening in our country. I am a hemophiliac who has depended on safe blood products and was infected with hepatitis C from medicine manufactured with contaminated blood in 1984 […]