When Matt Weston sits down to give blood this morning, he says he is repaying a favour. His five-year-old son, Jacob, has been receiving regular transfusions as part of his treatment for leukaemia at the Sydney Children’s Hospital at Westmead.
Since moving to Australia in 2011, England-born Weston and his Scottish partner, who have become dual citizens, have been barred from donating blood.
Matt Weston with his son, Jacob, who is receiving cancer treatment at Westmead.Credit:Rhett Wyman
“As a family, being recipients of blood has filled us with such overwhelming gratitude; if there were contact details for the people who gave Jacob blood, I would have called every single one of them,” an emotional Weston said.
“This is our chance to do something in return.”
From today, an estimated 750,000 people who lived in the UK for six months or longer between 1980 and 1996 will be allowed to donate blood in Australia following a decision by the Therapeutic Goods Administration in April.
Cath Stone, Australian Red Cross LifeBlood executive director of donor services, said that given about 3 per cent of Australians donate blood, Lifeblood hoped the change would allow around 58,000 more people to roll up their sleeves this year.
“The Brits are very similar to Australians; they look out for one another when called upon,” Weston said.
“I’ve got a chance to give back, to put it simply, and show some gratitude for a country that has given me so much in so many ways.”
The service needs more people to come forward as donors as winter viruses and the latest coronavirus wave result in about one in two appointments being cancelled.
“Winter is normally hard, but this one seems particularly hard: we have 11,000 cancellations daily in NSW alone at the moment,” Stone said.
However, Stone stressed the rule about British expats had not been changed due to supply concerns, but because the science showed it would be safe.
Australia is one of the first countries in the world to change blood donor rules for former British residents, who have been restricted from donating blood due to historic outbreaks of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or mad cow disease, in the country.
The change is supported by modelling from the Kirby Institute, which showed the risk of acquiring variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease from a blood transfusion in Australia was about one in 1.4 billion, and this risk would continue to decrease over time.
“In all our models, we took a wide range of assumptions and considered worst-case scenarios, and
still found the risk to be extremely low,” said Professor Matthew Law, head of the Kirby’s biostatistics and databases program.
Only two cases of the disease have been recorded worldwide since 2015.
Ireland lifted its ban on donors who were former UK residents in 2019, and the UK itself changed its rules – which only restricted use of local blood plasma – in 2021. This year, the US Food and Drugs Administration also determined local blood services could remove restrictions, which is expected to occur progressively over coming months.
“As time has passed, and we have over two decades worth of scientific evidence now, it’s time,” Stone said, noting she hoped the change would also encourage some of the 11 million Australians already eligible to donate to book in.
How to book a blood donation appointment
Another group still prohibited from donating blood is men who have sex with men, who must abstain from sexual activity for three months before donating, a rule put in place due to HIV rates.
But with Australia approaching elimination of HIV, Stone said LifeBlood was “working on a submission” for the Therapeutic Goods Administration to change its rules to allow plasma donations.
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