Blood donation in Australia

After years of being banned, the Australian Red Cross is finally considering reviewing its ban on males who have had sex with males in the past 12 months (i.e essentially all sexually active gay men and many bi and pansexual men). Apparently, the statistically higher occurence of diseases such as HIV among gay men (i am too lazy to actually search for statistics or a statistical analysis about the significance of whatever statistics may exist, so i will take the Red Cross' word) makes them high risk donors. This is nonsense. Risk assessment should be based on muliple factors (as it is typically done) across a range of critereon. Risk factor for sexually transmitted diseases should be based on the sexual practices of the person, rather than the sexual preferences. A promiscous person with lax protective practices will be of a higher risk than a person who only practices safe sex with one partner. This is regardless of who the person is, female, male, gay, straight or other. That we have gone for so long with such a discriminatory policy is disgraceful. The sooner we can rectify this situation and assess each person as an individual, the better.
JC