Blood donation forms will no longer include questions about sexual orientation. Until now, a homosexual man had to respect a sexual abstinence of 4 months to be able to donate blood.
“It was time”. Pierre-Alain Cottineau, president of the association lgbtqi+ from the Pays d’Ancenis, in Loire-Atlantique, will finally be able to donate blood legally.
He has already done this several times before having the right to do so: “I was in a relationship, we were already very informed about HIV and the modes of contamination, I am O positive so a universal donor, I am a caregiver and we see that the health services are short of blood supplies... So we want to help so much that we lie, we tick ‘no’ to the question ‘have you had sex with a man'”.
In 2012, he finally quit: “It’s heavy to lie. And then… lying to donate blood is a bit like denying yourself”.
But from this March 16, 2022, Pierre-Alain, like all men having homosexual relations will have the right to donate blood, without condition of abstinence.
One decree published in Official newspaper from January 13, 2022 removes any reference to sexual orientation in the questionnaires prior to blood donation, distributed by the French Blood Establishment (EFS). The abandonment of this criterion had been voted during the debates on the bioethics law promulgated last summer.
A long way… since since the AIDS epidemic which raged in the 1980s, homosexual men were no longer authorized to donate blood, due to the risk of transmission.
A ban that ended in 2016, but only on the condition of not having had sex for a year, period of abstinence reduced to 4 months in 2019. A very theoretical authorization therefore.
After Spain, Italy, Israel and England, France is therefore taking a step further, this March 16, 2022.
A step that Florient Poupon, president of Homogene, the LGBT center is delighted with from the Mans : “dBloodshed is a civic act, a lot of LGBT people were very frustrated that they couldn’t do it.”
A possible step, according to Jérôme Salomon, the Director General of Health, thanks to “the extreme vigilance of the health authorities”.
In one opinion rendered on December 20, 2021, the Haut Conseil de la Santé Publique (HCSP) considers that by removing the questions on sexual orientation from the blood donation questionnaire, “the estimated residual risk of selecting an HIV-infected donor would be multiplied by a maximum of a factor of 1.5, but which would remain lower than the residual risk calculated over the 2015-2017 period – 1/6,000,000 donations – which was already low“.
“Certainly, the modeling announces a low risk, confirms Sébastien Maury, of the association for the fight against AIDS Aids. But we prefer to remain cautious, the real results, we will not know them until the beginning of 2023″.
To mitigate the risk of transmission, the survey can still identify risky behavior incompatible with blood donation: multiple partners, drug use, etc. And a new criterion will be added: the donor will have to declare whether he is taking treatment for pre- or post-exposure prophylaxis to HIV, in which case the donation will be postponed four months later.
A new criterion “or rather nonsense”considers Violette Cordaro, President of the Nantes lgbtqi+ center, Nosig. “This law allows homosexuals who do not take Prep – a preventive treatment that protects against HIV – to donate blood. While those who take it, which therefore involve the least risk, cannot donate blood. But today, in the LGBT community, many people take the Prep, since there is still no vaccine”. An opinion shared by Aides: “Prep having proven its very high efficiency with the Prevent study, not integrating its users demonstrates a lack of understanding of sexual health strategies by the public authorities”.
To this question, the French blood establishment replies that “the taking these treatments results in a 4-month postponement because it can interfere with the HIV screening carried out during donations. The 4-month adjournment guarantees the reliability of screening tests and therefore the safety of transfused patients..