I'll try to answer briefly. It's a complicated set of questions, Mr. Davies, but the short answer is that in blood donor systems around the world, such as Canadian Blood Services and many organizations like ours around the world, we do not pay donors. That's been a long-standing principle of non-remuneration for voluntary blood donors.
There is a commercial plasma industry whereby donors are reimbursed between $25 and $40, typically. The debate has often gone around whether the reimbursement process causes a higher-risk type of donor to come and participate. The evidence is abundantly clear—and I've actually presented it to this committee in a different setting—that when you look at the plasma products that come off the production line at the end of the process, whether they come from paid donors or unpaid donors, there is absolutely no safety difference whatsoever. The products are identically safe. The reason for this is not only the screening questions and testing, but also that plasma goes through a different set of additional purification and inactivation steps that render the product extraordinarily safe. But that's for plasma products: that's why the argument and the evidence is clear that paid donors and unpaid donors result in equally safe products.
What we're talking about here is whether the donors themselves have increased frequency of transmissible diseases. Because we don't have the pathogen reduction steps in the fresh blood system, it's one of the arguments against any reimbursement at all. We really need to distinguish the finished products coming off the production process contrary to what we're talking about here, which is the safety of blood that doesn't have that additional step in it yet. This is one of the reasons that, as Dr. Devine said, it's a tiered safety net. You don't reimburse, you ask questions, you test, and you rely on honesty, and this results in extremely safe blood components for recipients.