I understand the issue with AIDS being more prevalent in the gay community. What I never understood with this ban is that if whatever mechanism they use on straight donators wouldn't work to prevent infected blood from gay people then it wouldn't work in the status quo for straight people either. Which then in turn sounds pretty scary.
The ban was put in place before there was an effective screening test for HIV in blood. Banning blood from groups with a much higher prevalence of the disease made sense then. Bureaucratic inertia combined with the fact that going from a lifetime ban to a one-year ban will mean that the increase in blood supply will be so minimal as to be almost unnoticeable to make raising the ban a very low priority. The symbolism, while not unimportant, of lifting the lifetime ban is the primary reason for doing so.
