Thank you very much, Mr. Kang, as I anticipated that this question might come from someone at the committee.
I'll be very brief, Mr. Chair, because it's an important, but obviously complex issue and it has played out significantly in the media this past week.
Canadian Blood Services follows the principle of voluntary non-remuneration of its donors, meaning we do not pay any of our donors for any of the products we collect from them whether blood, plasma, platelets, stem cells, organs or tissues. We have adhered to that policy at all times.
It is true that the amount of plasma that we collect in this country meets only about one-quarter of patient need for the important class of drugs called immune globulins, and we have to purchase the remaining required three-quarters on the international market, with most of those plasma derivatives coming from the commercial paid for-profit plasma industry in the United States.
If you look at the finished drugs that patients in Canada receive today, about three-quarters of those drugs come from paid donors and about one-quarter come from our plasma, which is from unpaid donors.
There is no safety concern with respect to the difference between products from paid and unpaid donors. The technologies, from a processing and a sterilization point of view, are exactly the same in all industries and there has not been a single case of disease transmission through paid plasma products or unpaid plasma products for the last three decades, almost 30-plus years now.
The issue that has been very dominant in the media of late hinges on two things. Firstly, a—