London - Jehovah's Witnesses yesterday denied reports that their leaders had decreed followers could now accept blood transfusions.
A spokesman for the organisation's UK headquarters rejected the suggestion that elders had ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses who accepted blood transfusions in life-or-death cases would no longer face excommunication.
Mr Paul Gillies said: "They [Jehovah's Witnesses] have consistently refused donor blood ever since transfusions began to be widely used in civilian medical practice in the 1940s and this scriptural position has not changed."