The American Red Cross is now allowing gay and bisexual men to donate blood without restrictions that specifically single out a person’s sexual orientation or gender, the nonprofit group said Monday.
how the hell have we reached a point as a society where people would rather literally fucking die than get life saving blood from someone who thinks differently from them?
This started off when HIV was much more prominent in the gay and bisexual male population than anyone else. The Red Cross, among other organizations, decided it was better to just deny blood from gay and bi males than to check all their samples for HIV. Similarly, you can’t give blood if you were in certain locations in the '80s and '90s due to potential exposure to Mad Cow Disease. At this point, while HIV is still somewhat more prevalent in that demographic, rates have gone down significantly and HIV has spread to the other demographics. It’s also easier to test for than it was then. Repealing these restrictions was proposed quite some time ago and didn’t face any real pushback, but bureaucracy is going to bureaucracy, so it’s taken years to get this settled.
It wasn’t the Red Cross, it was the FDA. This article phrases it as the Red Cross loosening restrictions because the FDA ended the ban in May, and the Red Cross’s own procedural bureaucracy is just now catching up.
Goddammit! I have o- blood and the red cross called me LITERALLY everyday after I donated the first time. I asked them to only call every quarter because I still did want to donate, but that just made them call every other day. Finally out of frustration I looked for anything that would make me ineligible to donate and the next time they called, I told them I was gay. All calls stopped after that.
I’ve even done doubles before! I’m glad that they aren’t pestering you, but that was not my experience. As another commenter said I don’t know if it was a problem with the system or what, but they contacted me repeatedly, even after I pointed out that I was ineligible to donate.
Apparently the people that call are a contracted phone bank, and don’t necessarily care if you’re not actually eligible, they get their money by the call.
Hi! I do just want to be clear that this was multiple months of calls and I did explain to multiple people that I have donated too recently for me to be eligible. This did not stop them from calling me again the very next day. Trust me, saying ‘I have had gay sex recently’ to blood donation associate was mortifying, if I had any other option I had already tried it.
Well that sounds like their internal systems suck. Here in Austria they have a robust database that sends me a SMS as soon as the waiting period is over from my last donation. It’s one SMS saying “you can donate again”, and that’s it. If I dont do it, they’ll call after a while. But never would they contact me while in the waiting period.
Trust me, this method did not work. I have donated blood 10+ times (Which isn’t a crazy amount, but I think it’s probably more than most people) because I know with universal donor blood it’s really valuable. But when you donated blood yesterday and they call you wanting more it can get pretty annoying…
I found that making an appointment, no matter how far in the future makes them stop calling.
I donate plasma (AB+) as often as I can, usually 2 weekly as that is the limit here. But if you’re single the 4 month halt for having sex with a new partner is annoying because they will keep calling while they say you can’t donate.
We should make it known to these people that it’s ‘gay blood’ though. What they do with their own body is up to them because I support bodily autonomy, including dying of bigotry.
The rule was very necessary in the 80s. It vast majority of HIV-infected individuals were gay and bisexual men. However, those days are long gone, and we can test blood pretty well for even very low levels of HIV nowadays.
Are youIn 2006, the AABB, American Red Cross, and America’s Blood Centers all supported a change from the current US policy of a lifetime deferral of MSM to one year since most recent contact. One model suggested that this change would result in one additional case of HIV transmitted by transfusion every 32.8 years. The AABB has suggested making this change since 1997. The FDA did not accept the proposal and had concerns about the data used to produce the model, citing that additional risk to recipients was not justified. Source
We are well past the 80s and decades behind something that should have. Been corrected a long time ago. The systemic discrimination towards gay men is apparent when you look at EU models of deferment compared to the US.
Maybe this is a cynical take, but will conservatives refuse a life saving blood transfusion because it may have come from a gasp gay man? I mean a bunch were refusing transfusions because the blood could have come from someone that had a gasp covid vaccine.
There are people who refuse blood transfusions because of relious beliefs and will let their children die. Of course there are some that would refuse “gay blood.”
Frankly dude, the amount of people, even fairly right-wing people who will be preoccupied with this is teeny tiny. I’m sure they exist but it’s a negligible amount of people. The person obsessed with stereotyping these people is you.
Under the new guidelines, anyone who has recently had sex with a new partner or multiple people and has also had anal sex would have to wait three months to donate
Those taking oral medication to prevent HIV infection, called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, still have to wait three months from their last dose to donate blood. People taking long-acting PrEP injections have to wait two years before donating.
Again, it has been screenable for decades. Just like many other blood-borne diseases. Why single out HIV as if it is impossible to filter out of the supply?
Why single out HIV as if it is impossible to filter out of the supply?
Screening accuracy is lightyears better today than it was decades ago.
Also, many things on the screening test won’t kill you in the event of a false negative on screening. A false negative for HIV screening meant a certain death sentence for the recipient, and that was true until just a few years ago.
Why single out HIV
HIV never was ‘singled out’. There are numerous other behaviors and activities that disqualify a potential donor that have nothing to do with HIV.
“Singled out” implies that that it stood alone as the only behavior that was screened for. But that’s not the case. There always have been and still are numerous other behaviors and activities screened for and denied.
No, ‘singled out’ means they made a special exception for it that they made for nothing else. They didn’t even ask if you had HIV, just if you had gay sex, as if you can’t get HIV from heterosexual sex. It was never about HIV, it was about marginalizing gay people once again. And you’re excusing it. Shameful.
They made special exceptions for people who live or travel to specific regions, they made special exceptions for people who have received certain medical procedures, they made special exceptions for needle-based drug users, they made special exceptions for people who’ve gotten tattoos or piercings, they made special exceptions for other sexual behaviors like paying for sex. You do know what the definition of the word “singled” means, yeah? It means “single” - as in “one”. They didn’t single out just that one behavior.
Yet again- they only asked if you had gay sex. They didn’t ask if you had sex. HIV can be transmitted through any kind of sex. Are you really not aware of that? Because if you are aware of that, why just ask about gay sex?
It’s a bit more complicated than that. In the early years of the HIV epidemic they at first didn’t even want to screen donors. The blood banks and the FDA were slow to introduce screening for a few reasons, one being that gay men were such good donors that a large proportion of the blood supply would have been removed. Eventually the risk became too great and do screening was introduced, just like we exclude those who were in Britain when TSEs were a risk. Note that these restrictions also never applied to lesbians, because they are not a high risk group.
40 years ago contracting HIV was still a serious, life threatening event. It’s also true that in the USA homosexual men represented one of the largest risk groups, unlike in Africa where other factors made spread between heterosexuals more common. It took hold in the gay male community due to the higher risk of anal sex, the popularity of bath houses, and the amount of sex men were having basically. Testing for HIV was also expensive. You could do it at the batch stage to reduce testing, but then you throw away a lot of blood. It’s only recently that PreP is widely available and used, so that HIV is more manageable (though it is still a serious illness).
My source for most of this is And The Band Played On, which apart from being one of the saddest books I ever read, outlines well the inaction by politicians, medical funding bodies, and even within the gay community itself, in tackling the epidemic. That it was allowed to happen is a black mark on the Reagan presidency.
A false negative for HIV screening meant a certain death sentence for the recipient, and that was true until just a few years ago.
Are you for fucking real? Don’t pretend it’s not still a life shattering disease.
You can’t just say, “oh well, it’s not as bad as it used to be.” There’s a vast spectrum between “it won’t kill you” and “it’s a total nothingburger” (wow, does that ever sound familiar). Now you’re immunocompromised, something you definitely do not want in this day and age. Now you risk passing it onto partners and children. Now your quality of life is degraded decades earlier than it otherwise would be.
Now imagine you contracted it, not because you voluntarily engaged in behaviors and you knew the risks, but because you received life-saving medical care. Then imagine learning it might have been prevented if the organization responsible was concerned with pandering to sexual identity politics than ensuring product safety.
This is, and has always been, about safety. Screening has improved. Research has provided more data on prevention and monitoring. They wouldn’t have changed the policies otherwise.
So…you agree with my position that Red Cross had good reason for the ban for the past several decades but choose to attack me because my argument wasn’t vicious enough? I think you arguing with the wrong person here, tbh.
Shit, you know what, I think I may have over-interpreted your phrasing to mean that HIV is no big deal because it’s no longer a short term death sentence.
They phrased it “men who have sex with men” because that was - and is - undeniably a huge risk factor in the transmission of HIV. It was an unprecedented public health emergency and I don’t think people nowadays quite understand how severe it was. Which is great, really, we’ve come such a long way.
Communication infrastructure was nothing like it is today either, there was a real absence of information and people were extremely scared, especially gay men watching their friends die. A blanket ban was the only sane thing to do in the circumstances.
Did it need to persist so long, perhaps not, but even 20 years ago AIDS was much less preventable and treatable than it is today. And the gears of bureaucracy turn extremely slowly at the best of times.
As someone else has pointed out, this is far from the only group excluded from the donor pool. It’s not a moral judgment, just a screening heuristic at the demographic level. That’s how things have to operate at the level of public services; i.e. population-level policy.
I agree. As I said in another comment, the book And The Band Played On is a great history of the AIDS epidemic in the USA and really hammers home just how devestating it was to gay men. It’s a fact that gay men are the major risk group in the West for HIV transmission. Heterosexual sex is much less likely to spread it compared to anal sex. There was a lot of mismanagement of it, but screening was a good idea, when it was finally introduced.
They just removed restrictions for Brits that were in the UK between 1980-1996 too, so I guess they’re just getting around to opening things up and this was on the list.
I was stationed in UK and couldn’t donate blood as a result. That was only ten years ago. Since they opened it back up I am getting constant calls to donate.
Why? AIDS was a devestating epidemic. The blood banks were slow to act at all, and as a result many haemophiliacs acquired the disease and died. Gay men were the largest risk group for spreading and contracting it, so it makes sense to screen them out.
It made sense in a crisis situation 40 years ago. It made zero sense the last few years to have such a discriminatory rule that also neglected to prevent risk from heterosexual anal sex.
In my country gay men account for 90% of all HIV infections. It’s very hard to ensure blood is free of HIV, as blood is infectious within three months of infection but won’t test positive
That time was not 2 years ago and also not 3, 4, 5, 6, 7… years ago!!!
There were also laws during the Corona pandemic to not leave your home in my country. A good idea during the worst phase of the pandemic, but if you’d keep the law many more years than necessary, it’s obviously BS.
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