The federal government will no longer automatically ban sexually active gay and bisexual men from donating blood to Canadian Blood Services, ending a policy that has long been criticized as discriminatory and lacking in scientific justification. Risk ought to be assessed based on behaviour, not stereotypes.Please log in to bookmark this story. It’s time for Health Canada and Canadian Blood Services to expedite the glacial pace of reviewing inadequate, archaic rules that discriminate against people like me based on gender and sexual orientation. Those in monogamous relationships won’t have to be abstinent at all. government finally agrees by the summer of next year, when the policy is to be implemented, gay men won’t have to give up their sex life to give up their blood. By applying individualized risk criteria to all people, not just gay men, the new rules will exclude heterosexual people who engage in behaviours shown to be high risk for contracting blood-borne viruses like HIV and hepatitis, such as anal sex outside of a monogamous relationship.Įthan Spibey, the British activist who has led a six-year campaign to have the rules changed, said “simply being a man who has sex with men is not a good enough reason to exclude someone from donating blood.” It seems the U.K. It actually makes the blood collected even safer. Of the U.K.’s plans to scrap the three-month window for gay men, health secretary Matt Hancock said “this landmark change to blood donation is safe and it will allow many more people, who have previously been excluded by donor selection criteria, to take the opportunity to help save lives.”īut the change does more than increase the depth of the blood donor pool. Yet the basic premise of the ban on gay men donating blood remains the same – that in being gay, we are, collectively, too risky a group to tap into. But it’s not the 1980s anymore HIV is no longer the mysterious “gay man’s disease” it once was and screening techniques have advanced significantly. Legitimate fears about HIV and hepatitis existed back then, as they do now. According to Canadian Blood Services, the agency responsible for Canada’s blood supply, only four per cent of Canadians roll up their sleeves to donate each year.Īfter the tainted-blood scandals of the 1980s, responsibility for Canada’s blood supply was transferred from the Red Cross Society to Canadian Blood Services. But despite our generous collective effort, shortages abound.
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My own record, working in a trauma intensive care unit in residency, was 202 units, or about 100 litres, of blood products poured into a single patient.Ĭanada’s hospitals collectively transfuse nearly 1 million units of blood each year to patients, all of it donated by Canadians. Trauma, cancer and transplant patients all require blood, sometimes hundreds of units in a single hospital stay. They also don’t take into account contemporary risk-reducing behaviours like using condoms and taking pre-exposure prophylaxis antiretroviral pills.Īs an emergency physician, I have seen donated blood save countless lives. Strangely, the same dogmatic rationale that bans gay men from donating allows straight people who engage in the same risky sexual behaviours to donate blood without so much as a caution. These policies are not based on risky behaviour they are based on heteronormative stereotypes that gay men act in ways that increase the odds of having HIV and other blood-borne diseases. While some would call this progress, the bottom line is unchanged: national blood donation policies discriminate based on gender and sexuality. Others, like Brazil, have had the courts strike down bans on the basis of discrimination while a few, like Spain and Argentina, have no restrictions whatsoever.
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The Netherlands, France and the United States adopted similar celibacy windows this year, in part because pandemic restrictions decreased donations and forced them to seek new donors. In 2019, Canada shifted to a three-month window during which gay men must abstain from oral and anal sex before donating.
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While the last few years have seen lifelong bans on gay men donating blood replaced with “deferral” policies that require gay men to abstain from sex for anywhere between three and 12 months, this is the first time gay men in a G8 country have not all been painted with the same brush. As a gay Canadian, it’s been a dream of mine to donate blood one that, despite the U.K.’s announcement, remains out of reach on this side of the pond.Ĭanada’s ban on men who have sex with men donating blood has been in place since 1977.
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The United Kingdom recently became one of the first countries in the world to commit to implementing an individualized, risk-based screening of donors and eliminate a blanket ban on gay men donating blood.