More gay and bisexual men can give blood – after wait of more than six years (at least!)
It is more than six years since I tore metaphorical shreds off of Michael Fabricant for suggesting the ban on all gay men giving blood should be lifted – and this announcement proves I was right.
At the time, Fabricant reckoned the ban on sexually promiscuous gay men should be lifted as straight men who behave in the same manner do not suffer the same discrimination.
I stated that this was insane – partly because it misrepresented the issue.
The problem, I said, was that the ban did not only affect sexually promiscuous gay men, but any man who had had sex with another man, with or without a condom.
This clearly discriminated against gay men who were in a monogamous relationship in which both partners were free of infection. They should not be covered by the ban, I said.
Fast forward to the new announcement:
Men who have sex with men in a long-term relationship will now be able to donate blood at any time.
The new criteria [focus] on individual behaviours, lifting a blanket ban for any men who have had sex with men in the last three months.
All blood donors who have had one sexual partner and who have been with their sexual partner for more than three months, will now be eligible to donate regardless of their gender, the gender of their partner, or the type of sex they have.
Under previous rules, all men who have sex with men had to abstain from sex for three months in order to donate.
It is as though the authorities had (belatedly) read my article.
There was more to it than is being stated by the BBC, though. Here’s what I wrote, back in 2014:
The ban was put in place – unless the memory cheats – because blood supplies donated by gay men were discovered to be infected with HIV. Anybody can see that a ban on anything that could spread HIV is entirely sensible and should only be lifted if technology has moved on enough for doctors to spot infected blood immediately or screen out the infection in blood that has been donated.
The issue then was that people who had been in a monogamous relationship for a long period of time, and who did not have HIV when they started it, were not going to have it when they applied to give blood either, and it was discriminatory to ban them from doing so.
The new change rectifies that. I welcome it.
Source: Blood donation: Rule change means more gay and bisexual men can give blood – BBC News
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