EU seeks to upgrade safety rules for blood, tissue, cell donations

A lady squeezes a ball to keep blood flowing while donating blood on the stage of the shut MAD (Moulin a Danse) night club all through the outbreak of the coronavirus disorder (COVID-19) in Lausanne, Switzerland, December 7, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

BRUSSELS, July 14 (Reuters) – The European Commission proposed on Thursday up to date policies on blood, tissue and cells to provide greater protection to donors and recipients and to improve access to revolutionary transfusion and transplant therapies.

The EU govt aims to prolong 20-12 months-outdated principles to include babies born from medically assisted replica and donors, together with the 15 million who give blood, as perfectly as more than 34,000 stem mobile donors and extra than 39,000 egg donors each calendar year.

Screening need to guard the 165,000 small children born per 12 months from donated eggs, sperm or embryos versus genetic problems.

The current policies would seek to secure donors from exploitation and threats to their very own health and fitness and require improved abide by-up and reporting of adverse outcomes of donating.

They would also prolong monitoring to other substances of human origin, these kinds of as breast milk and faecal microbiota that can be transplanted into a affected individual to boost their digestive systems.

The proposal, to include substances of human origin except organs, would find to harmonise procedures across the 27-country European Union to simplicity cross-border exchanges, increasing affected person access to therapeutics and enabling additional innovation.

Each individual yr, 4.6 million people today in the EU receive blood transfusions, 36,000 get stem mobile transplants and 2,000 have to have skin transplants for burns and other accidents.

The proposal also seeks to ensure the bloc is far more self-sufficient, with accessibility to existence-conserving treatments even all through a crisis. At this time, the EU imports up to a 3rd of the blood plasma it demands, primarily from the United States.

In contrast to the United States, the EU continues to be fully commited to voluntary and unpaid donation, which it sees as defending donors from exploitation.

The new guidelines, which the European Parliament and EU governments will have to have to approve, will serve as an EU-broad information, but particular person EU nations around the world will be no cost to have far more stringent regulations.

Reporting by Philip Blenkinsop Enhancing by Edmund Blair

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