(Israel Hayom) Ran Reznick - A blood-collection crew turned down an offer of a blood donation from an Ethiopian-born lawmaker at the Knesset on Wednesday. By order of Israel's Health Ministry, the MDA blood bank implements a host of constraints dictated by the need to decrease the likelihood of Israeli patients receiving infected blood. Anyone who lived in England during the time of the outbreak of Mad Cow disease (1986-2001) may carry a protein in their blood that could cause the disease, so they are not allowed to donate blood in Israel. For the same reason, the ban extends to people who were in Ireland and Portugal during that time. Additional restrictions on blood donation include men who have sex with other men, people addicted to drugs, and people who were born or spent more than a year in most African countries, including Ethiopia, that unfortunately have a very high incidence of AIDS. These three groups account for 75% of the 6,102 people in Israel infected with HIV in the last 30 years. It is impossible to justify or accept incidents in which Israeli hospital patients become ill from receiving infected blood because every possible precaution was not taken. These facts cannot be distorted by screaming headlines. Perhaps we must find a more sensitive way to deal with blood donations, but we cannot be any less careful.
2013-12-15 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive