This means that men who last had sex with another man more than a year ago are eligible to donate blood, while men who have had sex more recently are not. In 2015, US policy changed from a lifetime ban on donations (‘indefinite referral’) from any man who reported having sex with another man after 1977, to a 12-month deferral period. Many gay and bisexual men feel that such restrictions are stigmatising and discriminatory. Since men who have sex with men (MSM) have much higher rates of HIV than the general population, regulators have generally asked MSM not to donate blood. As a result, a small number of infected samples still make it through. For the most sensitive RNA assays used by blood collection agencies, this may be between 10 and 16 days. While all blood donations are screened for HIV before they enter the blood pool, all laboratory tests have a ‘window period’ in which very recent HIV infections cannot be detected. Research is being presented virtually this week after the face-to-face meeting in Boston was cancelled due to fears about the spread of coronavirus. The proportion of blood donations which had recent HIV infection did not increase after US authorities revised their guidelines for men who have sex with men, Dr Eduard Grebe of Vitalant, a nonprofit transfusion medicine organisation, told the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI 2020) today.
