The maternity fertility centre at the Centre Hospitalier du Luxembourg (CHL) says it has never used semen from the Danish donor with a genetic mutation associated with cancer whose semen was used to conceive around 200 children in various countries.
“According to our register, which traces the sperm of the donors used in our centre (whether via artificial insemination or in vitro fertilisation), the ‘Kjeld’ donor from the European Sperm Bank, a carrier of the TP53 gene mutation, has never been used with any of our patients,” Thierry Forges, a doctor at the fertility centre, told Contacto.
The specialist stressed, however, that he can only respond within the scope of the Medically Assisted Procreation (MAP) service carried out at the CHL centre, which began in 2005.
Forges explained that he also “can’t respond on a national scale, since there is no national or European register that establishes all the cycles of PMA with third-party sperm donors” in Luxembourg.
The specialist also pointed out that semen straws, sterile plastic tubes used to package, freeze, and store sperm samples from the aforementioned donor “may have been delivered to doctors’ surgeries with a view to artificial insemination or even to patients’ homes with a view to self-insemination”.
Contacto had initially requested clarification on the matter from the ministry of health, which in turn recommended contacting the CHL service directly, claiming that “as an actor on the ground”, the fertility unit “is best placed to respond.”
Information exchange network
Forges said that the European Commission has an information exchange network with the relevant health authorities in all EU countries. “This system works very well because in the event of an alert regarding a health problem detected in a child who was born as the result of a sperm donation, we receive the information simultaneously from the sperm bank and the ministry of health.”
The case of the Danish donor was due “on the one hand, to the lack of effective control of the number of patients who received [the sperm] and on the other hand, to the failure to detect the mutation, following the notification of the first case of paediatric cancer in 2020,” Forges said.
In Belgium, for example, a maximum of six patients per donor is permitted. He added that it was necessary to wait for a second case to be reported in 2023 for further analyses to be carried out and for the mutation to finally be detected in the donor samples.
Luxembourg at disadvantage without sperm bank
Unlike other countries, Luxembourg doesn’t have its own sperm bank. “[This] can be considered a disadvantage, in that we depend on international banks and have to rely on their quality control system,” Forges said. This is compounded by another disadvantage. “Our patients, who bear the cost of the samples, have to accept the banks’ pricing requirements.”
Forges said he doesn’t know which sperm bank is used most frequently by the Grand Duchy as a whole. “But in the case of patients at CHL’s fertility centre, it’s Cyros International in Denmark,” he told Contacto. Cyros is distinct from the European Sperm Bank that collected the sperm from the ‘Kjeld’ donor.
(This article was first published by Contacto. Machine translated with editing by Duncan Roberts.)