OTTAWA—Canadian Blood Services is lifting its controversial lifetime ban on men who have sex with men giving blood, but serious restrictions mean few gay or bisexual men are likely to start offering up their veins.

“We do not anticipate that this will bring a large number of gay men forward to the donor pool,” Dr. Dana Devine, vice-president of medical, scientific and research affairs at the federal blood donor agency said Wednesday.

That is because the long-awaited new policy recently approved by Health Canada reduces its restriction on accepting blood from men who have sex with men from indefinitely to five years, meaning potential male donors who have been sexually active within the past half-decade are still effectively banned.

“What we’re asking people to do is bear with us as we work through this process,” she said.

The new policy coming into effect this summer will replace the existing screening criteria, which excludes potential male donors who have had sex with another man even once since 1977 — the year HIV began spreading rapidly throughout North America.

The lifetime ban is part of the legacy of the tainted blood scandal of the 1980s, when thousands of Canadians were infected with HIV through blood transfusions.

Dr. Robert Cushman, director general of the biologic and genetic therapies directorate at Health Canada, said Wednesday that science and technology — particularly the ability to test rapidly and accurately for HIV in blood — has advanced to the point where an indefinite deferral is no longer necessary.

“The evidence was overwhelming that there was really no significant change between a five-year . . . deferral and an indefinite deferral,” said Cushman of the decision by Health Canada to approve the new policy suggested by Canadian Blood Services.

Ironically, the decision to go down the road to asking Health Canada to approve a change in policy grew out of an Ontario Superior Court decision in September 2010 that upheld the ban.

The ruling said giving blood is not a constitutional right on par with marrying and that there is epidemiological evidence to support the notion that HIV and other sexually transmitted infections are more prevalent in homosexual and bisexual men.

The judge nonetheless said there was not enough evidence to support an indefinite deferral period that grows longer with every passing year, and Canadian Blood Services began working quietly to make the change.

Reaction from critics of the lifetime ban was mixed.

“Any identity-based deferral is fundamentally opposed to the Canadian values of equality and non-discrimination on the bases of sexual orientation and gender identity,” Helen Kennedy, executive director of Egale Canada, said in a statement Wednesday, arguing a five-year deferral is just as discriminatory as a lifetime ban.

NDP health critic Libby Davies called the policy change a step in the right direction.

“I think they should have gone that little bit further and really based their policy on behaviour rather than sexual orientation,” Davies said.

Doug Elliott, a lawyer who represented the Canadian AIDS Society, which intervened in the 2010 Ontario court case that paved the way for this change, nonetheless applauded Canadian Blood Services for its courage on a sensitive issue.

“I recognize the fact that given the prominence of the tainted blood scandal in the Canadian psyche and the fact that we still have many people who are living with the effects of that horrible series of events, it’s difficult to manage change in this are in Canada. It just is,” said Elliott.

Elliott also said the key to getting the gay community on board with the change to a five-year deferral was a commitment to continue reviewing it as new evidence and technology emerges, something which Devine said Canadian Blood Services plans to do.

Devine said the agency will be collecting data on any change to the number of blood donations that test positive for infectious diseases — all blood being tested before it goes to hospitals — as well as closely monitoring whether anyone becomes infected from a blood transfusion.

Liberal health critic Hedy Fry, noting other developed countries such as the United Kingdom and Australia have reduced their deferral periods to one year, argued the evidence is already out there.

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“Canada does not have to reinvent the wheel,” Fry said.

David Page, executive director of the Canadian Hemophilia Society, which supports the change, has long argued that HIV, which can be detected easily and relatively quickly, is now less of a concern than emerging sexually transmitted pathogens that could strike a similarly devastating path through the gay community.

Page also believes it will be new technology able to deactivate viruses from fresh blood products, not data on incidence rates, that could open the door to different screening criteria.

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