Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Reuters NewMedia - Thursday November 15, 2001
The decision of the EU's 15 health ministers is aimed at increasing the quality and safety standards for the blood supply.
"I am satisfied we now have a solution that guarantees, on the one hand, a sufficient supply of blood and, on the other, the safety of the supply," EU Health Commissioner David Byrne said in a statement.
He said the tighter rules would involve "extensive testing of blood for the presence of possible contamination with transmissible diseases and donor screening."
The improved measures will oblige the 15 member states to test, label and trace blood used for transfusions or in medicinal products, the statement said. A Europe-wide surveillance system will also be imposed on laboratories and other enterprises handling blood.
The agreement reached on Thursday must be presented to the European Parliament before final adoption.
The new laws come in the wake of blood contamination scandals in France in the 1980s, when dozens of hemophiliacs died from HIV-contaminated blood transfusions.
Europe's mad cow disease crisis this year prompted Finland to make tentative plans to ban blood donations from people who lived in Britain for longer than 6 months between 1980 and 1996.
Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, has been linked to the rare human brain-wasting disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD).
The increase of vCJD cases in Europe has raised concerns among some member states about the safety of human blood transfusions.
So far, more than 100 confirmed cases of vCJD have been reported, nearly all of them in Britain. Due to the disease's long incubation period, which scientists suspect could be up to 30 years, there is no way to predict how many people may have been infected.
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