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Public Health

Mapping of More Stringent Blood Donor Testing Requirements - Mapping Exercise 2015

BACKGROUND

Directive 2004/33/EC defines the mandatory tests that must be performed on blood donors each time they donate. The legal basis of this legislation allows Member States to adopt more stringent measures on a national basis.

Implementation surveys have indicated that many Member States have done this, in some cases in response to local epidemiological risks and in some cases because they consider that a higher level of safety can be ensured with these more stringent provisions.

The more stringent measures are, in some cases, adopted in national legislation and, in some, they are defined by national standards organisations and are taken into consideration by authorities in their regular inspections.

Many stakeholders have suggested that these more stringent measures might create barriers to sharing of blood and blood components between Member States.

Additionally, manufacturers and developers of medicinal products derived from blood (both plasma derived medicinal products and advanced therapy medicinal products) comment that more stringent measures create a complex and unclear situation that makes distribution of these substances between Member States very challenging.

To address this issue, the Member State competent authorities and DG-SANTE agreed to map the more stringent donor testing measures and to make the mapping publicly available.

The objective is not to evaluate or comment on the requirements in place at a national level but to provide greater clarity and transparency on this topic.

METHODOLOGY

The exercise was conducted during 2015 by means of a survey that was completed by all Member State competent authorities. The preliminary findings were presented to the authorities during their regular meeting in November 2015.

This was followed by a process of clarification and verification with the authorities.

The data has been organised in individual country sheets and aggregated in one overview sheet.

Overview

In each EU country :

 

EEA Countries