The Daily Reveille published a story Wednesday regarding the Food and Drug Association policy regarding blood donation and male homosexual sex. Many have called the policy discriminatory towards homosexuals, homophobic and unscientific. Others have defended it on the basis of the AIDS pandemic that, according to a 2006 United Nations AIDS report, places the number of people with the disease at 38.6 million people.
At face value the policy does seem overly strict. Guidelines the Red Cross lists on its Web site include whether you “are a male who has ever had sexual contact with another male, even once, since 1977.” This discounts any homosexual contact for anyone who was born in our generation. In addition, the usual maximum time for persistent or severe symptoms to appear is cited as 10 years by the National Institutes of Health, although it can be longer. This leaves a 20 year gap between the 1977 barrier and the 10 years cited by the NIH.
The original measure was put in place as the HIV/AIDS crisis surprised health officials across the world, both with its widespread distribution and resistance to any kind of treatment. Originally described as “a gay disease,” it was then discovered to also be prominent among Hispanics from the Caribbean. As fears spread about the disease, strict guidelines were put in place in an effort to calm public fears about the disease. It was a frightening era, because both its cause and apparent distribution were widely unknown.
Fast forward to the future where AIDS testing is widely available and treatments exist to allow those infected with HIV to live relatively normal lives. As perception changes on the virus, shouldn’t this policy, largely conceived out of a fearful time, be revised?
To this, I give an emphatic “no.” To address concerns of “homophobia,” the fact that lesbians can donate blood, as long as they haven’t had sex with homosexual men, should assuage that fear. In addition, homosexual men can donate as long as they haven’t engaged in sexual contact with another male. As far as the ban being unscientific, it is a well known fact that men who have sex with men, as the Centers for Disease Control puts it, have a much higher rate of being HIV-positive than men who abstain. I further refer to the CDC’s report that in a 2005 study, 46 percent of active homosexual black men were HIV-positive.
The risk is ever present as well. While blood is individually tested for HIV worldwide, bad transfusions were responsible for 80,000 to 160,000 HIV infections, according to bloodbook.com. Some strains of HIV, called Type O, sometimes cannot be detected by available tests, and recently infected blood may not register with these tests. According to the NIH, because of stringent regulations and screening high risk donors, less than 40 HIV infections have occurred via transfusion since 1985.
While the FDA guidelines are extremely stringent towards male homosexual activity, a quick glance at other guidelines reveals extremely stringent regulations against a number of diseases. If you have spent “long periods of time” in a country where mad cow disease is present, you are not eligible to donate. If you have ever lived in, been born in or had close relations with someone in certain West African countries, you are not eligible to donate. If you have ever spent six months or more cumulatively in the United Kingdom from 1980 through 1996, you are “indefinitely deferred” despite the extremely low occurrence of the disease they are screened against, New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, with only 73 U.K. confirmed cases diagnosed since 1995.
These are not policies born out of irrational discrimination but rather out of a healthy paranoia and duty to protect the nation’s blood supply. With the impressive safety record of blood transfusions, it seems unnecessary to revise this policy. As the adage goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
—–Contact Jonathan Lo at [email protected]