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A technician handles plasma bags at the production and distribution centre for Canadian Blood Services in Brampton, Ont., on Friday.Arlyn McAdorey/The Globe and Mail
Canadian Blood Services says a plasma donor recently died a day after making a donation, but the charity believes the death was not connected to the donation itself.
Blood collectors such as CBS are required under federal regulations to report to Health Canada if a donor has died within 72 hours of making a donation. The initial report must be made within 24 hours of the collector learning about the death.
It is the first time CBS has reported such an incident since at least 2018, the earliest that records are available.
The safety and oversight of plasma donation has come under scrutiny in the past year after the deaths of two donors who gave plasma at Grifols, a Spanish pharmaceutical company that operates collection facilities in Canada through a partnership with CBS. Health Canada found operational deficiencies at multiple Grifols locations and suspended the licence of one site in September. The company temporarily paused operations in Canada, but announced last week it was going to gradually reopen.
Plasma is a golden-coloured fluid found in blood that is used as a key ingredient of some medicines, such as immunoglobulin.
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The latest incident involved someone who died the day after giving plasma at a CBS facility.
CBS said it is withholding nearly all the details of the incident to protect the donor’s privacy. The charity, which runs the blood system everywhere in Canada but Quebec, would not provide any details about the donor, where the incident happened or precisely when it occurred, preferring to say it happened “earlier in the fall.”
CBS chief executive officer Graham Sher told The Globe and Mail on Friday that a long-time donor and volunteer died a day after making a plasma donation. Dr. Sher said CBS only found out three weeks later, when the donor’s family told the staff of a CBS clinic.
Dr. Sher said CBS quickly reported the death to Health Canada. He said CBS then reviewed the records of the donor and the donation. He said that nothing unusual happened during the donation and the donor appeared fine when they left. He said the donor’s family told CBS that doctors had described the death the following day as being due to natural causes.
“I just want to put it this way: Donors are normal people with normal lives, and donors will have things that happen to them in their lives: motor vehicle accidents, illnesses, falls, trips,” Dr. Sher said in an interview. “Anything can happen to a donor. The same is going to happen to anyone else. And this, an event of a natural cause death, just happened to be temporally related to a previous donation.”
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Health Canada said it received notice of the death from CBS on Sept. 25, which would suggest the death occurred in early September.
Health Canada said it could not provide any more information about the incident, such as the date and location it occurred, out of concern for the donor’s privacy.
Earlier this year, the regulator provided The Globe and other media outlets the date and location of two other such deaths, which happened in Winnipeg on Oct. 25, 2025, and on Jan. 30, 2026. Health Canada did not immediately answer a question Friday about why it provided the information in previous cases but not in this one. Health Canada also disclosed then that it had received a report of a death on June 4, 2018, that also came from Winnipeg.
Health Canada said that, under federal regulation, CBS holds the responsibility to conduct a thorough investigation of this incident.
The regulator said it reviewed documentation provided by CBS, which said the charity followed appropriate procedures and there was no suggestion of equipment failure or malfunction. Health Canada did not say it was taking any further actions.
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Health Canada has previously told The Globe that as a regulator of blood and plasma products, it “does not determine the cause of death, including whether the donation process may have contributed to a death.”
CBS reports annual statistics on the number of “adverse reactions,” which is defined in federal regulations as an “undesirable response” associated with the collection of blood or plasma. CBS reported 28 adverse reactions in the 2025-26 year, which was lower than previous years.
Dr. Sher said the recent death is not classified as an adverse reaction because CBS believes it is unrelated to the donation.
Grifols announced in August that it had revised its own reports of serious adverse reactions, which involve incidents of injury or death, and believed there were only six such incidents that had occurred at its facilities since 2018, much lower than the 25 incidents the company had previously reported to Health Canada.
Hema-Québéc, the blood authority in Quebec, has reported three serious adverse reactions in that time.
None of CBS’s adverse reactions since 2018 have been classified as “serious.”
Globally, deaths connected to plasma donation are very rare. In the U.S., where millions of plasma donations are made annually, there are only a handful of deaths each year that may be connected to a donation, according to reports from the Food and Drug Administration.