Doubt over Russian blood ban move

This recently reported on Pink News and also on the Gay Russia website.

I, however, remain unconvinced. In such cases I follow the biblical rule of requiring 3 independent witnesses and here we have a lot of websites reporting from each other. There is no official confirmation (although to be honest, my Russian isn't as good as it should be so I might be missing Russian reporting of it).

It is being reported that it took only 2 years of campaigning (from I can tell this consisted of a few letters to the Health Ministry and an attempted - and outlawed - demonstration) to get the ban overturned.

This is being reported to be Russia 'setting a good example' to Western European countries. Hmmm.

It is also reported that the ban on prostitutes and drug users is also being lifted. Maybe there was a campaign by drug users and prostitutes to get their respective bans lifted as well. If so it has been very effective.

It's all a bit incongruous so I am not ready to believe it until I see independent confirmation.

Meanwhile our enemies on the religious right have also picked up on the news and are using it as a stick to beat us with, with a very interesting (and credible) statistic (from the FDA in the US) that MSN are 800 times greater risk of being HIV positive than first time blood donors and 8,000 times higher risk than repeat donors.