Red Cross wants tighter restrictions on blood donors

Concerns over mad cow disease

By Pete Hartogs
CNN Medical Producer

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The American Red Cross will ask an advisory committee to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to review expanding restrictions on who can donate blood and tighten limits already in place, the donor agency said Wednesday.

Because of concerns that Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), the human form of mad cow disease, might be transmitted through blood products, the FDA currently will not allow people who have lived in Britain for six months or more, from 1980 to 1996, to donate blood. There has been no evidence to date that it can be transmitted through blood transfusions and no cases of mad cow disease have been found in the United States.

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A form of the disease has been found in Europe, so the American Red Cross supports expanding the restriction to include people who have lived in France and Western Europe. The agency also believes the restriction on the UK should be tightened to less than six months and include any time period from 1980 to the present.

The advisory committee to the FDA will meet Thursday and make recommendations about further restrictions.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is the human form of mad cow disease, which first appeared in the United Kingdom and is now spreading slowly through Europe. CJD destroys the brain and has killed 88 people in England, one in Ireland, and three in France since it first appeared in the 1990s. Scientists believe people contract CJD by eating meat from the sick animals.

Researchers are still uncertain if mad cow disease can be transmitted through blood, and some in the medical community have argued that expanding the ban to cover France, Germany and other European countries is not the answer.

"The more you start prohibiting donors, the more you are going to have less blood in the supply," said Arthur Caplan, a medical ethicist from the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics. "It's still not clear you can get it from blood transfusions."

He's also concerned that current restrictions for the UK are not tight enough.

"All you have to do is pass through Heathrow and eat a bad hamburger," he explained. "We're not sure six months makes any sense."

Caplan chairs an advisory committee on blood availability with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. His comments represent his personal opinion, not the opinion of the committee.

The American Red Cross estimates that expanding the restriction on who can give blood would reduce the current number of blood donors by 5 percent to 6 percent.

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American Red Cross
Food and Drug Administration

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