In 1985 the Australian Blood Service introduced a permanent deferral for homos*xual males who wanted to donate blood. At that time the HIV virus was still a big question mark for the world medical community: people, most of them gay people, would be hospitalized and die in very little time of diseases usually curable with simple antibiotics. The gay male community was the worst hit by the virus be
cause of the specific s*xual activity, the reduced use of condoms, and the extremely higher number of casual partners a gay male would have, in average, compared to a heteros*xual male. Those circumstances forced a ban on gay blood. Today, HIV is well known. The use of NAT (nucleic acid testing) and ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) tests has brought the window period for detection of the virus from 22 to 9 days allowing a very safe control of all blood products. Plasma products in Australia, compared to whole blood and platelets, undergo an ulterior safety step as part of their fractionation process: the vast majority of plasma collected in Australia is virally inactivated while being processed into 17 different products extremely important for medical treatment (among which HIV and hemophilia). Following these advancements, countries like Spain and Italy have scrapped their ban on gay blood a decade ago and the risk of HIV transmission by transfusion, in those countries, has not increased since. In Australia the permanent ban was “lifted” and replaced by a 12 months deferral period for males who have s*x with males; which, still, makes it clearly impossible for gay males to donate, unless they volunteer to give up their s*x life altogether. The main concern for the Blood Service, are those individuals who engage in high risk activities: IV drug users, s*x workers and gay males who have non-protected in*******se (any kind) with multiple partners. The others, all the others, who are not keen to sleep with anything, and take good care of their condoms, or have been in a monogamous relationship for years, or also have adopted kids, those individuals, are 100% HIV free, and should be allowed to donate as much blood as they possibly can. BUT there is no question in the donor questionnaire that allows THOSE INDIVIDUALS to donate. The Blood Service give s no hope in Australia for a gay male to be somewhat HIV free, because for a minority, it is easier to exclude ALL of its members without further questions. GAY BLOOD DONATIONS, especially PLASMA donations, can become reality. If only our government, the TGA and the Blood Service were to acknowledge the existence of SAFE gay males.
