As blood banks around the country experience the annual summer shortage of donors, a 22-year-old Indiana man was denied the chance to donate because he “appears to be homosexual.”
Bio-Blood Components Inc., was following a 30-year-old federal policy — upheld in 2010 — that effectively bars gay and bisexual men from donating blood, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. The FDA policy states that men who have had sex — even once — with another man (since 1977) are not allowed to donate blood. The 1983 policy grew from concerns that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was tainting the blood supply, the paper reported, noting that “back then, screening tests to identify HIV-positive blood had not yet been developed.”
Now, however, HIV screening tests do exist. The outdated policy flies in the face of science; the FDA is choosing to let fear and bias trump facts.
Today, all donated blood is tested for HIV, the Sun-Times reported, as well as for hepatitis B and C, syphilis and other infectious diseases, before it can be released to hospitals.
Blood banks screen potential donors through standardized questions, a system based on honesty. Which is why, regardless of the answers, the blood is tested. Gay men do make up the majority of people with HIV. But logic tells us that doesn’t mean that all gay men are HIV-infected, or that heterosexuals are not.
At Bio-Blood Components, Inc., someone’s “gaydar” was taken more seriously than a man’s word, and more seriously than a blood test. (Men are not asked if they are gay. They are asked if they have ever had sex with another man. Because of course it’s also possible that a man may be gay, but has not yet had sex.) The man, Aaron Pace, who says he is effeminate, but not gay, told ABC News: “I was humiliated. This was my first time experiencing this.”
No doubt. Plotting your place on the sliding scale of sexuality isn’t required of others equally capable of carrying the HIV virus.
In 2008, 73 percent of people with HIV were male adults or adolescents, according to the CDC. More than half (63 percent) became infected through male-to-male sexual contact, around 17 percent through injecting drugs and 12 percent through heterosexual contact.
The majority of female adult and adolescents with HIV in 2008 were infected through heterosexual contact (73 percent) and the rest through drug use.
According to America’s Blood Centers, if only an additional 1 percent of Americans would give blood, shortages would disappear for the foreseeable future.
Allowing all healthy people to donate would be a good start.
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