Policies on blood donation

■ Following recent weather events, the Irish Blood Transfusion Service issued an appeal for more blood donors. I was, up to recently, a regular and committed blood donor, giving my donations three times a year.

However, despite being completely healthy and having the conclusive and irrefutable medical test results to prove this from the same testing facility used by the blood service itself, the blood service has placed me on a long deferral due to nothing more than my sexual orientation.

I encourage everyone who is eligible to donate blood as often as they can. But the Irish Blood Transfusion Service must also step up and reform its unscientific and arbitrarily discriminatory policies. Healthy and safe donors such as myself are being turned away from performing our civic duty due to nothing more than a seemingly wilful ignorance of scientific realities and this has to change, for everyone’s sake.

This is not simply an issue of fairness and decency, it is also about the need to implement a fully scientific set of donation policies, which would see all potential donors assessed on an individual basis at donor clinics, rather than the current regressive and entirely outdated group-assessment system employed by the blood service.

Tomás Heneghan Castlegar, Co Galway