The establishment of French blood (EFS) will eliminate from its archives that mention homosexual relations, a contraindication for a long time for blood donation, because its conservation no longer has reasons to be, said its general director delegated on Friday, August 22, confirming the release information.
“Until 2022, they led us to collect, during the interviews before the donation, data on what was a regulatory contraindication for blood donation, with the mention” HSH “(man who had sex with an editor’s note),” said Sara-Lou Gerber.
In 2016, the law authorized homosexuals to give their blood, which has been prohibited since 1983 by the risks of transmission of AIDS, with the condition that they have been abstinent for a year.
This period was reduced to four months in 2019, and the condition raised in March 2022, when any reference to sexual orientation in the questionnaires before donation was eliminated.
Temporarily archived data
In 2022, the EFS had “questions about what to do with these data”, and preferred “not to eliminate it immediately,” said Sara-Lou Gerber.
Then they were “archived” in accordance with the general data protection regulations, maintained in “a kind of capsule apart from the information system, accessible to a very limited number of employees and encrypted,” he said.
In the spring of 2025, a person wrote to the EFS to discover the data on them, request their deletion and a broader question about the conservation of this “HSH” data.
“The EFS then estimated that they do not bring an element to the safety of the transfusion that justifies their conservation, but we did not want to eliminate them without referring to the Ministry of Health and the ANSM,” said the director general delegate.
More than 15,000 signatures in a petition
The LGBT+ all association. Tes, who had communicated on the subject in July on Instagram, then launched a petition in favor of this suppression at the end of July, which collected more than 15,000 signatures.
“The EFS is being an experience in you, already mid -September, the largest of the data should have been eliminated, before the additional cleaning at the end of the maximum year,” according to the general delegate director of the EFS.
For donors dismissed for this reason they have never given a blood product, “their file and all the information about them will be eliminated, and if they arise in the collection, new donors will be considered,” he said.
For people who have made donations before HSH or after the 2016 contraindication, their profile will remain but the HSH mentioned. The EFS did not want to communicate the number of potentially worried files.
Source: BFM TV
