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According to Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, homosexual men in Israel will be allowed to donate blood without restrictions from October.
Previously, blood donors had to fill out a questionnaire stating whether they had sexual intercourse with a man in the past year.
"I have ordered the derogatory and irrelevant questions to be removed from the donor questionnaire," wrote Horowitz on Twitter.
»The discrimination against gays in blood donations is over.
There is no difference between blood and blood. "
The new blood donation regulation comes into force in October.
Then, in questionnaires for blood donors, a distinction is no longer made between homosexuals and heterosexuals when possible risks are asked.
The question is then whether there were risky sexual practices with a new or frequently changing partner.
So far, homosexual blood donors have been asked if they have had sex with a man in the past twelve months, a spokesman for Israeli rescue services said.
If this was the case, the men could donate blood, but it was frozen for several months and only released after a test for HIV, for example, in a subsequent donation.
Horowitz is the only openly gay member of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's cabinet.
The Israeli LGBT organization Aguda welcomed the decision as a "historic step" on the way to equality.
The blood of hundreds of thousands of citizens is not second-rate, it said in a statement on Twitter.
There is also a debate in Germany about changes to the restrictions on homosexual men as blood donors.
Currently, due to the risk of infection - for example from HIV - homosexual men are only allowed to donate blood twelve months after their last sexual intercourse.
Several state parliaments suggested that this time should be shortened significantly.
kim / AFP