Implicit valuation of a blood-exclusion decision

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Health Economics
• Bioethics

Background:

• Israel's policy excluded blood donations from Ethiopian immigrants.
• This policy raised significant ethical and public health concerns.

Purpose of the Study:

• To implicitly value Israel's exclusion policy on blood donations from Ethiopian immigrants.
• To assess the cost-benefit justification of this exclusion policy.

Main Methods:

• Adopting assumptions that overstate the public health effectiveness of the ban.
• Estimating the costs of HIV-infectious donations and benefits of healthy donations.
• Calculating social costs associated with ethnic exclusion and potential downstream HIV transmission.

Main Results:

• The analysis deliberately favored the exclusion decision.
• Even with a one-sided analysis, the exclusion policy is not cost-benefit justifiable.
• The social cost threshold for justification is $218,000 annually or $3.63 per Ethiopian immigrant.

Conclusions:

• The exclusion of Ethiopian immigrants' blood donations is not justifiable on cost-benefit grounds.
• Social costs of exclusion significantly impact the policy's economic viability.
• Ethical considerations of ethnic exclusion outweigh purported public health benefits.