Would-be donors who’d been told they could never give blood now can after the FDA eliminated a blood donor ban that dated back to the 1980s AIDS crisis.
For three decades, gay men who wanted to give blood were automatically banned from doing so. People who had used drugs “that weren’t prescribed by a physician”  and “sex workers”  also faced a ban.
That policy was put in place in 1985, at the height of a health crisis that involved a new illness known as AIDS and specified that any man who admitted having had sex with another man since 1977 could not give blood. Ever.
When I questioned the rationale of this ban five-and-a-half years ago, I stated that the scariest part of the entire situation wasn’t the ban itself but what the ban implied.
After all, homosexuals are not the only people who can become infected with HIV. Even heterosexuals can become infected through unprotected heterosexual sex. But there was no such ban put in place on sexual activity, or even unprotected sexual activity.
I pointed out that partners of drug users or “sex workers”  were eligible to give blood after a year, despite the fact that their partners were under a lifetime ban.
I wrote:
The implication seems to be that HIV can’t be detected in a banned donor’s blood until it’s too late, but that everyone else’s is not a problem…even if they’ve been exposed to someone who, by the FDA definition, should never be able to give blood.
Yet the American Red Cross says all donated blood goes through the same screening process.
The screening process either works or it doesn’t.
It either catches everything it’s supposed to catch or it allows HIV (or other diseases groups in the banned category of people might have) to be missed.
There logically can be no in between.
A friend I spoke to about this topic proposed this scenario: If I were about to have surgery and could choose which person I wished to have donate blood based on their sexual activity and drug use, would I tell the surgeon to use whichever was handy?
Granted, if I had the information beforehand, I’d choose the blood that seemed to come from the donor who seemed least likely to be infected.
I’d choose, knowing that if the screening process could be trusted, all of the blood that made it into the operating room would be perfectly safe, regardless of who donated it.
My hypochondria, it seems, isn’t as concerned about double standards as the rest of me.
Wow. I mean, wow. I know of the ban, but had not realised ever that high-risk people only included sex workers (I assume this means prostitution) and homosexuals. You are utterly correct – heterosexuals can donate heedlessly because we aren’t infected? Isn’t that assuming a lot? Certainly sounds like it. I used to organise blood donations at the companies I worked for, plus I donated via Apheresis: a three-hour process involving both arms, where they would take the platelets and some plasma, but mostly just the platelets, because I was CMV-negative. CMV just means cytomegalovirus, which translates into “big-ass cellular… Read more »