Homosexual activist sues to have gay Frenchmen donate blood on demand
Canada’s tainted blood scandal of the 1980s could be getting a sequel in France if a new lawsuit before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is successful. In 1997, Justice Horace Krever released a landmark commission report on systemic failures in Canada’s blood donation system that allowed approximately 2,000 Canadians to become infected with HIV from tainted blood in the 1980s. The report attributed the crisis to a variety of factors, one of which being the decision to import plasma acquired from high-risk populations in the United States. Despite this history, 48-year-old Laurent Drelon has filed a discrimination suit challenging France’s requirement that gay men abstain from sex for one year before donating blood, Yahoo News reports . The French Council of State upheld the rule last year. The one-year rule is itself a compromise from the country’s previous rule banning homosexuals from donating blood at all. But Drelon and his lawyer still find it intolerable. PLAYING W