As of 7 November, the UK’s ban on blood donations from men who have had sex with men will be lifted. It is to be replaced by a new rule, stating that blood cannot be donated by a man who has had sex with another man within the last 12 months. The new 12-month criterion is based upon the fact that hepatitis B can remain undetectable in donated blood for up to a year in some cases, and that gay and bisexual men, as a group, remain at a higher risk of carrying the disease (and other blood-borne illnesses such as HIV) than the general population.
I will leave the argument over whether it is fair to categorise gay men as a group rather than by specific sexual behaviour to more eloquent commentators; my main concern about the new rule isn’t its inclusiveness, but what it says about sexual health awareness and spending in the UK.
Last week the House of Lords Select Committee on HIV and Aids in the UK called current efforts on HIV awareness ‘woefully inadequate’. A quarter of people with the virus don’t know they have it, yet last year the government spent just £2.9 million on HIV awareness campaigns – less than the £4 million it spent in 2004 on the ‘Sid the Slug’ campaign about salt content in food.
Hepatitis B, too, seems to receive scant attention. Hepatitis B is an extremely infectious disease that can cause cirrhosis and liver cancer. It claims 22,000 lives across Europe every year. An effective vaccine exists that can protect people against the virus, but the UK is among just 15% of countries who do not run a national vaccination programme.
The Department of Health instead issues the vaccination to public servants who are at risk of the disease, and recommends that other at-risk groups – including gay men – obtain a vaccination from their GP or a specialist centre. This voluntary approach means that millions of people are unnecessarily at risk of exposure to the disease. And, again, not enough is being done to raise awareness, with half of those infected with the disease unaware that they have it.
In these straitened times, of course, it must be hard to find money to spend on new sexual health awareness campaigns – so here’s some food for thought. Between 2002 and 2008 the health service spent at least £32 million on homeopathy, including £20 million to refurbish the London Homeopathic Hospital. To put it another way, £32 million of taxpayers’ money was scandalously wasted on scientifically unproven quackery. The NHS followed scientific advice when deciding on rules about blood donation. Perhaps now it will follow scientific advice when deciding how to spend money. It’s time to ditch the sugar pills.
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