For-profit plasma clinic opening in Toronto as Ontario prepares ban on paid blood ‘donations’

A battle is underway in Ontario that could shape the way all Canadians give blood.

The Ontario government is preparing legislation to stop private, for-profit companies from setting up blood-donation centres in the province. Despite that, one outfit is going ahead with plans to open a clinic in downtown Toronto to collect blood for plasma, the Toronto Star reported Tuesday.

Canadian Plasma Resources expects to be in operation within days, chief executive Barzin Bahardoust told the Star.

If it succeeds in staying open, presumably it could open the door to servicing other provinces.

It's one of two companies with plans to set up shop in Canada. The other is CanGene Plasma, which already operates a clinic in Winnipeg. The company, which makes plasma-based products, was recently acquired by U.S. rival Emergent BioSolutions.

[ Related: Payment for blood donors comes to Canada ]

Paying for a blood donation (sort of an oxymoron, really) is not illegal, but has come under fire from critics who say it could undermine the traditional altruistic donation system.

Some believe it also poses a threat to health, pointing to the tainted-blood scandal of the 1990s, when thousands of Canadians were infected with HIV and hepatitis C from blood and plasma sourced in the U.S., where donors are routinely paid.

The Krever Commission inquiry into the disaster included a recommendation that Canada get its blood and plasma exclusively from unpaid donors.

Canadian Blood Services, which replaced the Red Cross as primary operator of the blood system outside Quebec (which has its own agency), issued a statement last year affirming it will only source plasma products from donated blood.

But proponents point to the perennial shortage of blood and blood products, seeing paid donations as a way of increasing the supply.

"The fact is Canada's need for plasma significantly exceeds our ability to produce it," Canadian Plasma Resources said in a statement last week, according to The Canadian Press. "There is no evidence that compensating plasma donors weakens the voluntary donor system."

Bahardoust told the Star the clinic will open initially to train staff and provide plasma for "research purposes."

“When we get licensed by Health Canada, as long as the regulations in Ontario are not changed, we will compensate donors," he said.

Donors can chose between a $25 donation on their behalf to Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children or a $25 Visa gift card that can't be converted to cash.

The Ontario government announced Friday it wold introduce legislation in the early spring to bar Canadian Plasma Resources and similar firms from opening.

“They haven’t started up business yet so that's why we [are] moving quickly now to make sure they can’t,” Health Minister Deb Matthews told the Star.

Matthews suggested the location of the first clinic (another is planned for downtown Toronto and a third for Hamilton) seems designed to exploit those in need of money.

“They are located in pretty poor neighbourhoods, so it is pretty clear who their target is,” she said.

[ Relagted: Ontario moves to ban paid blood and plasma donations ]

Matthews said she intends to rush through the legislation to make payments illegal.

Bahardoust noted Manitoba has allowed paid plasma donations for 25 years and his company would not be collecting plasma for transfusion, using it instead to make pharmaceutical products.

But Mike McCarthy, an activist during the tainted-blood scandal, noted it was blood products that infected some 30,000 Canadians in the 1980s and early '90s.

The products were produced from blood purchased from "blood brokers" who received it from prison inmates, clinics on Los Angeles's skid row and Russian funeral homes, McCarthy said in a Star op-ed piece last March.

That practice, too, was justified by blood shortages, McCarthy, a hemophiliac infected with hepatitis C from tainted blood, said in his commentary.

"I cannot stay silent while our blood system is again compromised," McCarthy said.