Gay and bisexual men are permanently excluded from donating blood. The blood of every single man who has had anal or oral sex with another man, whether or not they used protection, is apparently too likely to contaminate UK blood banks. However, the fact that every single blood donation is screened using two different and very sensitive virus tests forces one to conclude that, conscious or not, the continued existence of this rule must be the result of an underlying prejudice.

The National Blood Service (NBS) justifies its position (pdf) on the basis that there is a "window period" in which viruses are undetectable in recently infected blood. Consequently, they argue that it is not in the interest of public health to ever accept blood donations from homosexual and bisexual men. What the NBS seem to communicate less willingly is the fact that this window period only exists for a few days. Given the significant improvements in blood screening, does this line of reasoning warrant a lifetime exclusion for homosexual and bisexual men from donating blood? The answer is simply no.

Statistically, a gay man may be fractionally more likely to have infected blood: however, a vetting process that determines the acceptability of a heterosexual's blood, based on their sexual activity, should suffice for homosexuals too. If it doesn't, then serious concern should be raised as to the efficacy of the entire vetting process.

There is a huge inconsistency in the NBS's argument if you can be told that the blood screening process is reliable and effective, but not effective enough to screen the blood of gay men. As far as I was aware the nature of hepatitis or HIV and the biological components of blood are not determined by sexuality. Either the screening is effective, or it is not.

Furthermore, given the NBS's plans to increase blood stocks by nearly 38% to compensate for the flu season and the fact that the recent swine flu "crisis" will mean that less people are eligible to donate, is it sensible to be automatically excluding approximately 2 million potentially healthy donors? The position seems even more ridiculous when we consider that only 4% of those eligible to give blood actually do so.

The problem with the NBS's current exclusion position is that it is unnecessarily discriminatory. If the screening process and vetting processes are effective enough there is no need to distinguish between heterosexual and homosexual blood. Scientific progress would appear to have made the distinction redundant. If its position does not change the NBS will, willingly or not, hold an increasingly illegitimate and homophobic view that implies homosexuals are secondary citizens whose blood is not safe for the rest of society.

The same statistics that the NBS use to argue their case also show that 46% of those newly diagnosed (pdf) with HIV in the UK are black African. Does this mean, given their current logic and the fact that the window period only exists during the earliest stages of infection, that there should be a permanent exclusion on blood donations by black Africans? No. No one would contemplate excluding a minority from making blood donations based on their race. Therefore, if a legitimate scientific reason does not appear to exist, why are we tolerating the exclusion of a minority based on their sexuality?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/08/blood-donation-gay-r...