How to get STD results in British Columbia
All donors should get tested for STDs on a regular basis, regardless of how risky their lifestyle is. Any KDR recipient can and should ask a prospective donor for recent STD results, and since this request could come at any time, every donor should have recent results that he can share when asked. In my own quest to get STD results here in British Columbia, I found a couple of ways to go about it.
STD / STI Clnics
In Canada, STD clinics are managed at the provincial level, with each province providing STD clinics in most major cities. Some googling will quickly locate a list of clinics that will provide free STD testing. Here's a great resource that offers clinic locations by province.
The BC CDC clinics tend to only checked for the big-ticket items:
- Gonorrhea (bacterial, urine test)
- Chlamydia (bacterial, urine test)
- Syphilis (bacterial, blood test)
- HIV 1 & 2 (viral, blood test)
- Hepatitis B & C (viral, blood test)
This is all great information, but there are several things that this clinic could/would NOT test for, including CMV and HTLV. Maybe other Canadian clinics provide a wider array of tests, I couldn't say. So for me, enter the second part of the story...
Canadian Blood Services
Not surprisingly the CBS folks test every blood donation before clearing it for use in saving lives. I've been donating for years, and recently discovered that if you file a request, the CBS will send you the results of the STD testing they do on your donation, along with several non-STD tests they conduct. So I sent in an application, more out of curiosity than anything else, and here's what came back on the report they sent me the next day:
- Blood type
- Syphilis
- HIV 1 & 2
- Hepatitis B & C (several different tests for these)
- West Nile Virus
- HTLV I & II
- CMV
This is a great complement to the other list above, and told me my status for several other disease types (all negative, fortunately!). Of course, the blood folks won't be taking urine samples anytime soon, so I'll still need to go to the CDC clinic for the urine-based tests.
Giving blood is a humane, caring thing to do, and for anyone who's also donating sperm, it can also get you some important STD results data as well! You probably wouldn't want to file a request every time you donate (that might raise some red flags) but once or twice a year would probably be reasonable. Here's the link to the information request form.
