Canadian Blood Services hopes that Health Canada’s approval of an eligibility change will mean thousands of new blood and plasma donors.
Those who lived or spent time in the United Kingdom, Ireland or France in the 1980s and 90s were previously not eligible to donate because of the risk of the human variant of the neurological disorder in cows called BSE.
A news release from CBS says the criteria was put into place in the late 1990s by blood operators around the world as a precautionary measure.
Decades later, the ban on being able to donate will be lifted, as of December 4th.
CBS spokesperson, Ron Vezina, says, “Our data tells us that since 2003 approximately 70,000 people in Canada tried to donate, but were not able to because of these criteria.”

In February of 2022, Canadian Blood Services removed the criteria to permit people who lived or spent time in Saudi Arabia, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein to donate blood and plasma and with the announcement of the expansion to include the U.K., Ireland and France, Canada is now aligned with other blood operators that no longer have this rule in place including the United States, Australia and Israel.