“Go see Tainted. Yes, it is emotionally difficult but it’s a wonderful play. Take kleenex.” – Mooney on Theatre
If you live in Toronto, Hamilton, London, Windsor, Kingston, Ottawa or Thunder Bay, “Tainted” is coming to a theatre near you.
Best of all, tickets for the October 18-30 cross-province tour are courtesy of OPSEU.
Moyo Theatre’s Tainted debuted on stage last year in Toronto and has since been seen in Vancouver and the United Kingdom. This tour will be a “performed reading” by seven professional actors at seven podiums.
For more information, including dates it will be in your city, go to the OPSEU Diablogue.
Tainted tells the emotional story of a fictional family impacted by Canada’s tainted blood scandal in the 1980s. Playwright Kat Lanteigne developed the script from interviews she conducted with families impacted by the biggest public health disaster in our history.
More than 30,000 Canadians were infected by hepatitis C and HIV from blood products imported from the southern United States, some of it collected in prisons and other high-risk communities. While the U.S. FDA approved export of the tainted blood product in the 1980s, it banned it from domestic use.
One of the key recommendations of the public inquiry that followed was to ban paid blood donation except in rare exceptions – such as the need for rare blood types. Desperate donors who contribute blood for money are far more likely to misrepresent their health risks in the screening process.
Yet a new for-profit clinic opened this spring in Toronto offering to pay donors for plasma. They have plan to expand across Canada challenging the donor base of Canadian Blood Services (CBS). Further CBS closed its Thunder Bay Collection Centre in 2012 claiming it didn’t need the 10,000 units of plasma collected locally. Yet its annual report showed it was increasing U.S. imports by 10,000 units. Since then CBS has further damaged its ability to collect volunteer donations from Canadians, recently claiming the shortage is the worst it has been in four years. Could there be an agenda to further privatize Canada’s blood system?
This tour is intended to remind Ontarians of the consequences of looking for profit in something as essential as blood.
Ontario is proceeding with second reading of a bill to prohibit paid blood donation in the province, but Health Canada has taken no steps to ensure the same takes place across the rest of Canada. Nor have the provincial stakeholders in CBS taken any action to make Canada more self-sufficient in blood and blood products.
Reserve your seats on-line by going to http://moyotheatre.com
Note: Shows at The Foundery (Toronto) and the Isabel Bader Theatre (Kingston) are now full. Tickets are still available at all other locations, including Dancemakers Theatre in Toronto.