Australian Red Cross Blood Service - Infectious Diseases

Infectious Diseases

Blood donated in Australia has been tested for Hepatitis B since 1972, HIV-1 since 1985, Hepatitis C since 1990, HIV-2 since 1992/3, and HTLV-1 since 1993.

As with other blood transfusion services, the ARCBS has had to strike a balance between protecting blood recipients against infection, and accepting enough donors to maintain an adequate supply of blood. This has led to debate over which categories of potential donors should be excluded. For example, to protect against CJD, the ARCBS now refuses donations from anybody who lived in the United Kingdom for a total of six months or more between 1980 and 1996.

The service has a policy of barring men who have had sex with other men during the previous twelve months from donating blood (an earlier policy had excluded any men who had had sex with other men since 1980, regardless of time elapsed). This has been the source of ongoing controversy, and is currently before the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commission. People who have engaged in heterosexual or female-to-female sex during the past 12 months are allowed to give blood. Female-to-female transmission is considered by the Centers for Disease Control to be rare. As well as deferring blood donations from people who have had male-to-male sex, other categories of sexual activity can also result in a 12 month deferral, such as sex with a prostitute or having a partner who has tested positive to hepatitis B or C.

In 2003, a federal government report found that despite the introduction of Hepatitis C screening from February 1990, infected donors were told to keep donating until July of that same year; a total of 20,000 people were estimated to have been infected with Hepatitis C via blood products. Some infected blood was given to CSL and may have been used in thousands of CSL products, although it has not been shown that any of these products caused infection in the recipients. .