Health. Blood donation: data mentioning homosexual relationships will soon be removed

The French Blood Establishment (EFS) will remove from its archives data mentioning homosexual relationships, long a contraindication for blood donation , its deputy director general announced this Friday, confirming information from Libération . "Until 2022, we were led to collect, during pre-donation interviews, data 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)," Sara-Lou Gerber specified.

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

Data that provides “no evidence on transfusion safety”

In 2022, the EFS had "questions about what to do with this data," and preferred "not to delete it immediately," said Sara-Lou Gerber. It was 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, request its deletion, and question the broader retention of this "MSM" data. "The EFS then considered that it did not provide any evidence on transfusion safety that would justify its retention," the Deputy Director General argues.

A petition launched

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.

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 blood collection, they will be considered new donors," she specified. And for people 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 files potentially affected.