UK to ease rules on blood donations by gay and bisexual men

Britain announced Monday that it would loosen restrictions on blood donation by gay and bisexual men beginning next year, a shift in policy called “landmark” by the government and hailed by activists who have long fought rules they described as discriminatory.

The change will take effect next summer after the recommendations of a health committee that said a blanket ban on sexually active gay or bisexual men donating blood should be lifted. The government accepted these recommendations, saying that the changes would not affect the safety of the blood supply.

“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,” Britain’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, said in a statement Monday.

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The current rules stipulate that “all men must wait three months after having oral or anal sex with another man before donating.”

A statement released Monday by the National Health Service removes the three-month barrier and says that gay and bisexual men who have had the same sexual partner for more than three months will be allowed to donate if there is no known exposure to a sexually transmitted infection and they are not using drugs to stop the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Britain joins a growing list of countries — France, Italy and Spain — that have relaxed rules on blood donations for gay or bisexual men. The restrictions were largely introduced in the 1980s during the AIDS epidemic, when global authorities feared spreading HIV through the blood supply.

Since then, however, new HIV infections have become rarer in Western countries, and screening has vastly improved.

The United States and Australia still require men who have sex with other men to wait three months after having sex before donating blood. Both announced changes to their rules in April, after thousands of community blood drives were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, and global blood supplies plummeted.

Medical professionals, however, have said the changes did not go far enough, with a group of more than 500 U.S. doctors, researchers and public health specialists signing a letter calling on authorities to eliminate the constraints.