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Terrence Higgins Trust reaffirms their support for the ban on gay donors
Billy Blood
"We are right to defend gay blood ban" - THT
"The National Blood Service needs to do more work on helping gay men understand why they are excluded from donation"
The debate over the right of gay men to donate blood has hotted up again, thanks to comments made by the UK's main HIV/Aids charity defending the National Blood Service for maintaining its life ban on donations from gay men.
Opponents of the ban point out that while a straight man who has unprotected sex with a prostitute is still entitled to donate blood after only one year, the ban on gay men giving blood is life-long, even if that man has never had sexual intercourse, much less unprotected sexual intercourse, is for life.
"By excluding groups known to present a particularly high risk of blood-borne viruses, we are already reducing the risk of infected blood entering the blood supply," says the National Blood Service. "While safer sex, through use of condoms. does reduce the transmission of infections, it cannot eliminate the risk altogether."
Liss Powers, Head of Policy at the Terence Higgins Trust voiced the organisation's support for this stance, though she did say the National Blood Service needed to do more work on helping gay men understand why they are excluded from donation. "We support the current attitude of the NBS but we do feel they could go a lot further to explain themselves," she said. "I didn't understand the ban unitl I sat down at length with the people from the NBS and really went into it very carefully. Now I understand it."
She says that she understands the anger of those gay men who don't appreciate the risks but argues that the NBS has to "play the odds" when it comes to getting donated blood and the odds with gay men, who they explain account for 65% of cases of HIV are too high. Though the NBS screens every donation, it cannot always detect infection if it has occurred in the last three months and for this reason regularly turns down blood from men who have had sex with other men.
