A survey will be conducted in coming weeks to establish the effects of banning Irish people who have lived in countries badly affected by BSE from donating blood.
The ban is one of several steps being considered by the Irish Blood Transfusion Service to prevent any potential risk of vCJD being spread by blood transfusion.
In countries where such a ban is in place blood supplies have dropped, and the IBTS is anxious to determine how many donors would be lost in this State.
People who turn up to donate in coming weeks will be asked a number of questions including whether they lived for a time in the UK, where most cases of vCJD seem to have originated. CJD or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is the human form of mad cow disease.
Some countries, including Canada, the United States, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland and Austria, have excluded donors who lived in the UK during the peak of the BSE epidemic.
This has led to up to 5 per cent of donors being lost in these countries. A spokeswoman for the IBTS said the exclusion rate in Ireland could be as high as 13 per cent. Minutes of last month's board meeting of the IBTS, released under the Freedom of Information Act, recorded Dr William Murphy, the service's national medical director, advising several strategies should be considered by the IBTS to guard against any potential spread of vCJD through the blood supply.
He said these included:
permanently deferring donors who had lived in the UK for six months or more from 1980 to 1996;
permanently deferring donors who had ever had a blood transfusion;
sourcing plasma for clinical use and blood components for neonatal transfusion from a country outside the BSE zone e.g. Australia, the US or Canada;
a programme of optimal blood use at hospital level.
