Safety of Canadian Blood Supply Questioned After Mishandling Revealed

Canadians were questioning the safety of their blood supply Thursday after disclosures that U.S. and Canadian health officials had detected substandard practices at collection centers.

Officials at Health Canada, the federal health department, acknowledged Thursday that they had ordered four collection centers to halt some procedures for as long as two weeks because of noncompliance with regulations.

However, the department declined to specify the problems and identified the sites of the four centers--in Montreal; London, Ontario; Regina and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan--only after a public uproar.

The violations surfaced after the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported earlier in the week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had suspended some shipments of plasma from Canada to North Carolina for processing. The FDA acted after inspectors found improper procedures at a Canadian Red Cross blood center in Toronto.

FDA spokesman Lawrence Bachorik said in a telephone interview that a routine inspection found mislabeling of blood; failure to check some donors for needle marks, which could indicate a greater risk of HIV infection; and failure to trace earlier donations of those found to be HIV-positive.

The plasma in question would have been shipped to North Carolina for processing and then returned to Canada. The processing is done in North Carolina because Canada lacks an equivalent processing facility. There is no threat to the U.S. blood supply.

The revelations come as a national commission investigates procedures in the 1980s that led to the infection of more than 1,000 Canadians with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, from tainted transfusions. Critics of the Red Cross and Canada’s health department were quick to suggest that the latest disclosures show that little has been done to correct past mistakes.

“The whole blood business in Canada has this attitude of ‘We know what’s best for you and we’ll take care of it,’ which is what got us into trouble in the past,” said Janet Conners of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, whose husband contracted HIV from a transfusion and then transmitted it to her.

“That scares me, to think that four centers were shut down and they won’t say why,” Conners said in a telephone interview.

“Not only are we angry at the Red Cross, we are very concerned about what our health protection branch at the federal government is doing because they’re the watchdog for blood safety in this country,” said Lindee David, executive director of the Canadian Hemophilia Assn. in Montreal. “Some of these violations are quite serious.”