Good morning. I am the bisexual representative on the outgoing NUS Scotland LGBT+ committee, which submitted the petition. I have had to step in at very short notice, so please excuse me if I read this off my device. Thank you for having us here.
The blood ban prevents gay and bisexual men from giving blood, in an attempt to reduce HIV transmission. It was brought in in the 1980s at the height of the AIDS crisis, when there was a lot of fear and uncertainty about how HIV spread and what could be done about it. Obviously, it is now 2017 and we understand how HIV spreads. We know how we can prevent it, and we understand how we can test for it very sensitively and very shortly after a person has been exposed. According to the Terrence Higgins Trust, the recent introduction of PrEP—pre-exposure prophylaxis—which can prevent the spread of HIV, has reduced the number of new infections among gay and bisexual men over the past couple of years. We are moving forward.
As it stands, the ban affects quite a large range of LGBT+ people, not just gay and bisexual men. It affects transgender people in that transgender women are often classified as men. It is quite ambiguous about transgender men, who might be classified either as women or as men. Often, staff do not know how to enforce or interpret the rule, and it becomes complicated. The ban also affects women who have sex with bisexual men or with men who have had sex with men. That is another rule that is quite difficult to enforce, as it may not be clear whether a partner has disclosed that information. I will return to that issue later. The ban applies to LGBT+ people pretty much across the spectrum, regardless of their actual behaviours and their actual level of risk.
The ban is quite difficult to enforce, as compliance is relatively low compared with some other deferral periods and waiting times, such as those for piercings or dentistry work, which the Advisory Committee on the Safety of Blood, Tissues and Organs—SaBTO—has claimed can be more of a risk than shorter deferral periods.
We believe that, if the donation rules were based on an individual’s risk, people would take the matter much more seriously and not decide whether something is scientific and valid and should apply to them on an individual basis, which is what seems to be happening in some cases at the moment.
The ban does not currently have that basis, because it is based on a statistical risk, given that we know that gay men are more likely to have HIV. However, that does not mean that any individual gay man is as likely as any other to have HIV. Nevertheless, a man who has had a negative HIV test and who is in a monogamous relationship with another HIV-negative man is currently banned from giving blood for a full year after the last sexual contact in the same way that a man who is having unprotected sex with unknown people is banned for a year.
The Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service is aware that, in the context of current testing techniques, it is not necessary to have a deferral period of a full year, and it is considering a reduction in the deferral period to two or three months from the last sexual contact. That is based on how long it takes for hepatitis B to be detected in the blood; HIV is not, in fact, the limiting factor—it can be detected earlier.
We are not advocating for the rules to be changed in a way that harms patients or puts them at risk. We want them to have access to the blood that they need without a risk of HIV transmission or of the transmission of any other blood-borne disease. We want a non-discriminatory, science-based approach to the policy. For us, that means introducing individual risk assessments whereby risky behaviours, not risky sexualities, incur the temporary waiting period, which should be as long as is necessary for the detection of pathogens but no longer.
We have heard that more people are prevented from donating blood under individual risk assessments than under the current blanket one-year deferral period. That goes to show the discriminatory nature of the ban in that those people whose behaviours are genuinely risky but who are not LGBT+ are passing under the radar while LGBT+ people who are potentially low risk, on the basis of their own individual behaviours, are being prevented from giving blood essentially on the basis of a statistical prevalence that is outdated and founded mostly on prejudice rather than on science and logic.
We are asking for the matter to be looked into and for the best way to go forward and change the policy to be pursued.