Prisoners’ blood remains taboo despite Kerala HC ruling

Despite the Kerala High Court's recent observation that the criminal background of a person should not be a disqualification for donating organs as their organs could not be considered "criminal kidney or liver", the issue remains a taboo.

Blood banks are not entertaining prisoners to donate blood as they are considered a high-risk group with chances of infections like sexually transmitted diseases and drug abuse.

Earlier, prisoners in Kerala used to donate blood, and there were provisions for remission of up to 15 days in their sentence for each blood donation. But now, no blood bank authorities are entertaining blood from prisoners. Bringing blood under the definitions of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act following instances of the spread of infections like HIV through blood transfusion is learnt to have led to restriction of taking blood from prisoners.

Deputy Inspector General of Prions S Santosh told DH that no request for blood donors came to the prisons for more than ten years. Now that the High Court had observed that the criminal background of a person should not be a disqualification for donating organs, the restrictions on collecting blood from prisoners may hopefully see some change.

Dr N Vijayakumar, medical officer of the Regional Blood Transfusion Centre at Aluva in Ernakulam, said that the restriction on taking blood from prisoners came after blood was brought under the purview of Drugs and Cosmetics Act and Rules following public interest litigation in the Supreme Court in 1994. The PIL followed the spread of infections through blood transfusion. Moreover, the coercion factor could be involved in taking blood from prisoners, he said.

The rule states that "no person shall donate blood and no blood bank shall draw blood from a person more than once in three months. The donor shall be in good health, mentally alert and physically fit and shall not be inmates of jail person having multiple sex partners and drug-addicts."

A doctor in charge of the blood bank at Thiruvananthapuram medical college said that even as prisoners were considered as high-risk group, earlier there used to be a practice of accepting blood from prisoners. But over the last many years, prisoners' blood was not being taken. Moreover, there is an an adequate number of voluntary blood donors now, said the doctor.

Even as all sorts of tests are conducted before using the blood donated by a person, the chances of certain infections remaining undetected during the window period were there. Though voluntary blood donors are subjected to pre-donation counselling, those with criminal backgrounds need not disclose chances of infections like STDs, said a blood bank official.