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Is having a foreign-born sexual partner automatically a hard barrier where a doctor at a blood donation center has to send a potential donor away in Germany? Or is there some leeway in decision-making, depending on factors like:

  • Where the sexual partner is coming from
  • How long the partner already lives in Germany
  • How many previous partners the sexual partner had
  • If the sexual partner is willing to undergo tests for the diseases this rule is meant to contain

Are there other factors beyond these that could influence the decision? And a related question: Is there a system in Germany to donate blood which does not fulfil the requirements of medical use on patients, e.g. for use in biomedical research?

Edit: Here's the exact wording of the critical question on the german blood donation questionnaire:

In the last 4 months, have you had sexual intercourse... ...With a person who was born abroad or lived there for more than 6 months?

gurkensalat
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    Welcome to Medical Sciences. Do German blood donation centers even ask questions like this? Why would it matter where a sex partner lives? For reasons mentioned in this post and in [ask], we require some degree of prior research when asking questions here. The basic requirements for donating blood should be readily available online, so your question should at least reference those. – Carey Gregory Jan 25 '22 at 15:49
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    Yes, this question is on the questionnaire. I added a link and the the exact wording. – gurkensalat Jan 25 '22 at 16:01
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    re: blood for research purposes...I don't know specifics about Germany, but a) Blood collected for a specific research purpose is most likely collected by recruiting people to donate specifically for the study, rather than from some repository, b) Researchers are just as concerned with reducing the chance that research staff come into contact with HIV, so I doubt these restrictions would be relaxed. – Bryan Krause Jan 25 '22 at 16:53
  • @BryanKrause I don't know that I agree with b). Having personally collected whole blood from a research participant in the US, I know that no such restrictions are put in place. For example, the FDA has strict guidelines on restricting donation among men who have sex with men. However, no questions addressing these restrictions were included in the intake nor consent process. Such research restrictions would also substantially hamper efforts to address important health issues which cause the restrictions. – Ian Campbell Jan 25 '22 at 18:13
  • @IanCampbell Yeah on second thought you're probably right, I've never seen that either. I was thinking back to a time I used some postmortem organs where the procurer was fairly obsessive in their testing but that's a bit different in circumstances. – Bryan Krause Jan 25 '22 at 18:59

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