UK loosens restrictions on gay, bisexual men donating blood

British officials will roll back some restrictions on gay and bisexual men donating blood beginning in 2021, Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced Monday.

“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,” Hancock said in a statement, according to The New York Times.

A health committee recommended the changes to the government, saying the blanket ban on donations from all sexually active gay or bisexual men was unnecessary. The new rules are set to take effect in summer 2021.

Current regulations bar donations from any man who has had anal or oral sex with another man within the past three months. The new rule will eliminate the three-month window as long as there is no known exposure to sexually transmitted infections.

“We have for so many years felt as if we were dirty,” Ethan Spibey, founder of the British activist group FreedomToDonate, told the Times. “This policy is a fundamental shift toward recognizing people are individuals.”

British activists have denounced the status quo as discriminatory for years, as have their counterparts in other countries with similar restrictions.

Many such rules were introduced at the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, but as the epidemic has subsided in many Western countries, nations like France, Italy and Spain have rolled them back. The United Kingdom itself shortened the window from a year to three months in 2017.

The United States and Australia also announced changes to their restrictions in April after the coronavirus pandemic led to a steep decline in blood donations. A group of U.S. doctors, researchers and public health officials have called for the restrictions to be eliminated entirely, according to the Times.

“We are not advocating for relaxing standards that would compromise the safety of our blood supply,” they wrote. “Instead, we advocate for scientifically driven standards that uphold the utmost safety of the blood supply and simultaneously promote equity and reverse historical discrimination in blood donation.”