“Right now we are looking at a year but we will continue to look at it in future. She said the review was part of a drive to make sure blood donation policies were more inclusive and equitable. The length of time gay men were banned from giving blood was gradually reduced before being scrapped completely last month.Ĭatherine Lewis, a spokeswoman for Canadian Blood Services, said it had made the request to Health Canada to end the lifelong ban on sex workers donating blood in the past few weeks, having done research to ensure the recommendation would keep the blood supply safe. The move follows an end last month to the ban on gay and bisexual men from donating blood, which was welcomed by MPs and LGBTQ advocates.Ĭanadian Blood Services said it would be prepared to recommend that Health Canada reduce the time sex workers have to wait before donating blood to less than a year, but wanted to make changes incrementally. The ban, introduced 45 years ago, is set to be replaced by a one-year “deferral” after paid sex work. The blood-donation service this month recommended to Health Canada that it abolish the lifetime ban on donation by people who have taken money or drugs in exchange for sex. The AP is solely responsible for all content.Canadian Blood Services wants to scrap a lifetime ban on sex workers giving blood in a further move to make blood donation more equitable. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education.
They caught the virus from pet prairie dogs that been housed near imported small mammals from Ghana.ĪP writers Mike Stobbe in New York and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin contributed to this report. The cases were mostly linked to travel in Africa or contact with animals from areas where the disease is more common. In the past, isolated cases of monkeypox have been spotted outside Africa, including in the U.S. Most are in Congo, which reports about 6,000 cases annually, and Nigeria, with about 3,000 cases a year. The World Health Organization estimates there are thousands of monkeypox infections in about a dozen African countries every year. HOW MANY MONKEYPOX CASES ARE THERE TYPICALLY? On Tuesday, Germany’s Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said the outbreak “is not the beginning of a new pandemic” but needed to be contained quickly. Many of the cases being identified have no links to previous infections, suggesting the virus is already spreading widely. Still, Britain’s Health Security Agency has said it expects to see new infections “on a daily basis” and WHO’s Europe director warned that the summer season of festivals and parties could spread the disease. Monkeypox also requires very close contact to spread, so it is not likely to prompt big waves of disease like COVID-19, which can be transmitted in the air by people with no symptoms.
has 1,000 doses of a vaccine approved for the prevention of monkeypox and smallpox, plus more than 100 million doses of an older-generation smallpox vaccine in a government stockpile, officials said.Īny outbreak of an emerging virus is concerning, but most of the cases have been mild and there have been no deaths so far. is offering high-risk contacts the smallpox vaccine and recommending anyone who might be infected to isolate until they recover. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control recommended all suspected cases be isolated and that high-risk contacts be offered a smallpox vaccine. Smallpox vaccines are effective against monkeypox and anti-viral drugs are also being developed.
Most people recover within about two to four weeks without needing to be hospitalized, monkeypox can be fatal for up to 6% of cases and is thought to be more severe in children.