Pressure On Once More to End Gay Blood Donor Ban
0The perennial issue of men who have sex with men (MSMs) being banned for life from giving blood has resurfaced, with the some saying that the ban is in place for good reason while others argue that the gay ban is stricter than similar restrictions for heterosexuals.
The Red Cross and other groups that sponsor blood drives are required to abide by regulations imposed by the Food and Drug Administration, which has determined that men who have had sex with men since 1977 are not allowed to donate their blood, a May 27 CNN article recounted.
Those rules also stipulate that people who have lived in certain countries at specific times--such as Great Britain between 1980 and 1996, the latter year being the height of the mad cow disease scare--may not ever donate. Others have to wait 12 months: heterosexual men who have had sex with prostitutes, or anyone who has gotten a tattoo.
All blood received from donors is tested for HIV and other pathogens, but current testing methods cannot detect HIV levels in blood before at least two weeks have elapsed from the time of a person's initial infection. The chances are extremely low that a recipient could contract HIV from donated blood--but the risk, however small, is still non-zero.
For Dr. Jay Brooks of the University of Texas Science Center, that is reason enough to keep the ban in place, CNN reported. Brooks favors equality before the law for gays, including family parity and military service, but from a purely scientific perspective, he said, the ban is necessary. "The interest of the recipient is greater than any donor," Brooks told CNN. "I'd hate to tell the one person who got HIV through a blood transfusion, 'Sorry, we changed the regulation.' "
Moreover, said Brooks, "I do not see this being a gay rights issue." Added Brooks, who is a professor of pathology, "Any group that's epidemiologically at risk of making blood unsafe, it's unfortunate [but i]t's a matter of epidemiology."
Donors are on their honor to be tell the truth and refrain from giving blood if they fall into any restricted category. Some restrictions are a matter of medical history: anyone who has had a form of blood cancer cannot donate. But MSMs, many of whom consider themselves straight even though they might have sex with other men, and people who have used hypodermic needles for non-medically approved purposes--such as steroid use or intravenous drugs--are on their honor to refrain from donating, which means that donated blood has to be screened in any case.
Even aside from issues of blood screening, some say that placing a lifetime restriction on gays is needless and discriminatory. As a demographic, gays may be more prone to HIV infection than straight men, but monogamous gay couples are no more liable to be positive than heterosexual couples. And the gap between gay and straight transmission of HIV is not as wide as many might believe: same-sex contact between males accounts for 47% of HIV transmission--but sexual transmission among straights account for about a third of all HIV cases.
Kerry, Others: FDA Regulations Should be Consistent for Gays, Straights
Moreover, if discriminatory standards are to be employed based on a person's sexual conduct, those standards ought to be the same for gays and straights, argue some. In a March 9 letter to the FDA, eighteen senators, led by John Kerry, wrote to the FDA to protest the seeming double standard: wrote Kerry, "a heterosexual who has had sex with a prostitute need only wait a year [whereas a gay man can never donate blood]. That does not strike me as a sound scientific conclusion."
Concerns on both sides of the debate may eventually have to bow to the numbers. A May 26 Scientific American article noted that the rules for blood donation are so strict that only 38% of Americans are allowed under FDA rules to offer their blood--and the number of the eligible who actually do donate is far less: a mere 8%. Those relatively few individuals have to meet a pressing need; Scientific American said that 38,000 transfusions are needed each day.
Some health professionals are calling for that need to be met through a reassessment of the standards that donors are required to meet. "Today's technology makes it almost impossible for HIV to slip through, and the total ban puts a huge burden on blood agencies and the blood supply," said AIDS researcher and HIV drug developer Mark Wainberg, lead author of a recent article on the subject, in a statement.
Wainberg and his co-authors called for a reconsideration of the requirements in an article published in the Medical Association Journal. "We constantly have blood shortages that would not occur, perhaps, if we had a more reasonable policy," said Wainberg in a statement; in the article, Wainberg, et al, note that changing the ban from life to a five-year period for MSMs "would lead to an increase of 71,400 donors, whereas a one-year deferral would lead to an increase of 139,000 donors."
The issue is scheduled to be addressed by the Federal Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability next month, CNN reported, but the same article also noted that the FDA has reviewed its regulations around the subject twice in recent years, without making any changes.
Wainberg noted that the current regulations are holdovers from the early 1980s, when gays were much more predominant as AIDS sufferers and testing was much less effective. While the simple formula of gay = HIV risk may have been almost understandable when so little was known about HIV and AIDS, "this no longer makes sense in 2010, and with each passing year it makes less sense," Wainberg opined.
The public agrees, Wainberg says, noting that potential donors who qualify under the current regulations sometimes decline to offer their blood because the discriminatory nature of the blood ban offends them. "When a discriminatory policy isn't justified by the science, it leads to controversy," Wainberg asserted. "We've seen protests and boycotts of blood drives on Canadian campuses, so I think the blood agencies would be better off if they agreed with us. I suspect, honestly, that many of them already do, in private."
Students at Northwestern university in Boston recently protested the FDA's ban, noted an article in student newspaper the Daily Northwestern; one student described how staff told him that even lying in bed hugging another man was "gay" enough to make him ineligible to donate.
Similarly, students at the University of South Dakota objected to the ban during a recent blood drive there, reported student newspaper the Volante Verve. That article noted that San Jose State University stopped sponsoring blood drives on campus two years ago in protest against the FDA's regulations.