Blood donation in Germany

Germany will lift the strict restrictions governing blood donations by homosexuals since the 1980s and the start of the AIDS epidemic, the Minister of Health announced (January 10). “Whether or not someone can become a blood donor is a matter of risky behavior, not sexual orientation,” Minister Karl Lauterbach said. “There must be no hidden discrimination on this subject,” argued the Minister of Health in the government of Olaf Scholz. The amendment to the law on transfusions that the minister will present, quoted in the German press, now stipulates that “sexual orientation and gender identity should not be exclusion criteria”, says AFP . The modification of the law is announced for April 1, 2023, but the Order of Physicians will have four additional months to develop a new non-discriminatory directive. Restrictions on blood donation for homosexuals, dating from the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, were then motivated by fears that the risk of transmission of the virus through blood donation was particularly high among gay men. According to the current directive of the German Medical Association, homosexuals can only donate blood if they have not had sex with “a new partner or more than one sexual partner” in the last four months . The directive had already been slightly relaxed in 2021: before this date, the deadline was twelve months, specifies AFP. The lifting of these restrictions, denounced for many years by anti-discrimination associations, is included in the contract of the coalition between Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals in power since the end of 2021. “The abolition of discrimination is expected for a long time and I am delighted that Karl Lauterbach is attacking it now ”, reacted the ministerial delegate for the LGBT cause Sven Lehmann, in the media. “It is not sexual orientation or gender identity that should be decisive for an exclusion from blood donation, but only the individual risky sexual behavior of potential donors,” he argues. Before Germany, many countries, such as France, Spain, Italy, Israel and England, have already changed their conditions of access to blood donation in this direction.