An article in the Independent from Johann Hari highlights the discrimination of the blood ban in Australia, just like here in the UK.

A 21-year-old gay electronics technician called Michael Cain launched a court case against the Australian Red Cross after they refused to take his blood. He wants gay men who exclusively practice safe sex – like him – to be allowed to donate like everyone else

“They explained that blood banks now have to choose between two competing risks. On one side is the high risk of people dying because they are given old, stale blood due to a lack of donors. On the other side is the infinitesimally small risk of people dying because they have been given blood by condom-wearing gay men.”

They hit out at the Red Cross with a numbers game, the US epidemiologist and bio-ethicist Dr Scott Halpern crunched the figures for the court:

Some 1 in 100 people who are infused with blood older than 14 days will die – and 13 per cent of infused blood offered by the Red Cross is older than that. This, he explained, poses a risk “thousands of times greater” than “the very worst predictions of HIV infection” if you let latex-loving gay men donate. Why? Because if the ban is lifted and gay men who practice safe sex are allowed to donate, a single HIV-positive blood donation will slip through clinical screening once every 5,769 years. That’s one time between now and the year 7777 – or equivalent to it happening once since 3761 BC, when cities had not yet been invented.

This goes to show that people ARE dying because of a lack of fresh new blood, blood that healthy, condom wearing gay men have…..

This is why we need to fight this!

Article Source: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-people-are-dying-because-gay-men-cant-give-blood-959316.html