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End of last month, scientists from Canada said it is time to change the policy that bans blood donations in Canada from all men who have sex with men. (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

Many developed countries – including the UK – have a lifetime ban on blood donations from men who have ever had sex with other men, even if the encounter took place many years earlier.

The policy was introduced in the early 1980s as the threat of HIV/Aids emerged.

But writing in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Mark Wainberg and Norbert Gilmore note that the highly sensitive procedures now routinely used for testing mean it would be very hard for infected blood to slip through.

It was time, they said, to consider scrapping the old policy of “indefinite deferral” and look at asking men to wait between one and five years after having sex with another man before giving blood.

“The current policy is counterproductive in terms of loss of donors, loss of good will, student protests, donor boycotts, among other negative effects,” they write.

“We believe that any potentially negative consequences of a change in deferral would be offset by the benefits.”

Transmission time

Opponents of the lifetime ban point to new testing techniques which are able to detect the HIV virus in the blood after as little as 12 days – down from three to six months previously.

Thus a “window” where infected blood might unknowingly enter the supply system remains, but it is a very short one. And opponents of the lifetime ban also point to the moral issue of double standards.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/10163222.stm

Interestingly a paper from BMJ (http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/338/feb26_1/b318) holds a very different opinion.