Good news on the plasma for pay front. I heard back from my federal MP again on March 14/13 and he has forwarded my concerns to the federal Health Minister. The Ontario Health Minister is already aware of my concerns as I previously posted on this issue. Now I am just waiting to hear back from either level of government. Before posting this update today, I check Health Canada's website and coincidentally, there is a Q & A document related to new blood and plasma collection procedures. The document was designed to address some of the issues that I pointed out in my original post on this issue. The link to the document is here
In summary, Health Canada is confident in the technical and regulatory procedures that it has in place. Then again, everyone was confident of it's regulatory procedures before the diluted chemotherapy drug scandal showed up in Ontario and Nova Scotia recently. The Red Cross was also satisfied with it's procedures for testing blood and plasma before the tainted blood scandal occurred. As we all found out later, they were very very wrong. Canadian Blood Services as well as Health Canada are convinced that they have learned from previous mistakes. I guess we will have to wait and let history be the judge of that.
