Blood donation: EFS to delete data mentioning homosexual relationships from its archives

The French Blood Establishment (EFS) will delete from its archives data mentioning homosexual relationships, long a contraindication for blood donation, because their retention is no longer necessary, its deputy director general announced on Friday, August 22, confirming a report from Libération.

"Until 2022, we were required to collect data during pre-donation interviews on what was a regulatory contraindication to blood donation, with the mention "MSM" (man who has had sexual relations with a man - editor's note)," explained Sara-Lou Gerber.

In 2016, the law allowed homosexuals to donate blood, which had been prohibited since 1983 due to the risk of transmitting AIDS, on the condition that they had been abstinent for a year.

This deadline was then reduced to four months in 2019, and the condition lifted in March 2022 , when all reference to sexual orientation was removed from pre-donation questionnaires.

In 2022, the EFS had "questions about what to do with this data" and preferred "not to delete it immediately," said Sara-Lou Gerber.

They were then "archived" in compliance with the general data protection regulation, stored in "a sort of capsule separate from the information system, accessible to a very limited number of employees, and encrypted," she assures.

In the spring of 2025, a person wrote to the EFS to find out what data was held about them, to request its deletion and to question more broadly the retention of this "MSH" data.

"The EFS then considered that they did not provide any evidence on transfusion safety justifying their retention, but we did not want to proceed with their removal without referring to the Ministry of Health and the ANSM," argues the Deputy Director General.

The LGBT+ association Tous.tes, which had communicated on the subject in July on Instagram, then launched a petition in late July in favor of this removal, which collected more than 15,000 signatures.

"The EFS is currently undergoing an IT audit, and by mid- to late September, the bulk of the data should have been deleted, before further clean-ups are carried out by the end of the year at the latest," according to the deputy general director of the EFS .

For donors rejected for this reason who have never donated a blood product, "their file and all information about them will be deleted, and if they present themselves for collection they will be considered new donors," she specified.

For individuals who donated either before the MSM contraindication or after 2016, their profile will be retained but the MSM reference will be removed. The EFS declined to disclose the number of potentially affected files.