Organ donor rules cut gay men

January 9, 2008

By John Miner, Sun Media

New Health Canada regulations that restrict the transplant of organs from sexually active gay men and injection drug users are reasonable precautions, a leading transplant doctor said yesterday.

"The intent of the guidelines is to prevent communicable disease being transmitted from a potential donor to potential organ recipients," said Bill Wall, head of the multi-organ transplant program at London Health Sciences Centre.

Viral and other diseases have been spread through organ donations in the past, he said.

Wall said the new regulations, which took effect in December, are aimed at risky behaviour, not individuals. They are similar to the restrictions for donating blood.

"As a blanket statement, the sexual orientation of a potential donor is irrelevant if that individual is healthy and has no communicable disease," he said.

The difficulty for medical officials is that if an individual has just been infected with a disease such as Hepatitis C or HIV, it can take three to six months before tests will show it, Wall said.

But the director of the multi-organ transplant program for the University Health Network in Toronto criticizes the new rules for zeroing in on gay men.

"In the past, the gay community was considered a high-risk community because of a perception of high-risk behaviour," Gary Levy said.

"We now know it's not a homogeneous community. The fact is, if someone has 62 partners, whether its heterosexual or homosexual, there still is a risk."

The London transplant program was consulted on the changes that also restrict the use of organs from individuals who have had recent tattoos or engaged in sex for money, Wall said.

Included in the regulations is the ability to transplant organs from higher-risk individuals such as sexually active gay men if, in the judgment of physicians and transplant surgeons, the risk of disease transmission is low.

The recipient also has to be informed of the risk.

A case could be an individual who is dying of liver failure and the only donor available is an individual with an element of risky behaviour, Wall said.

"Perhaps the individual is known to be monogamous and his sexual partner is normal and healthy and has no communicable disease," Wall said.

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This article posted March 16, 2008