IV drug users are prohibited from donating in Canada anyway. Along with gays.All high risk groups for blood born illness are excluded, as they should be.
People who present a high risk of infectious disease should be excluded from blood donations. However, the FDA has just decided that gay people who have undergone screening and who have not had gay sex for a year are not a high risk group. Even if gay people have higher than average risk, there can still be subsets of gay people with very low risk.
I’m not sure how it was or how it has changed in the US or Canada but in the UK it used to be the case that if you’d ever had any sexual contact with someone of the same gender then you could not give blood, either for money or as a donation ie a blanket ban on homosexuals or even anyone that has experimented.
Now the focus has shifted to a screening system based on individuals rather than entire demographics. So if an individual puts themselves at risk by having casual unprotected sexual activity that is likely to result in getting HIV then they should quite rightly be restricted from giving blood. However, if someone is in a monogamous relationship with someone that happens to be of the same gender then they will be permitted to give blood assuming they pass the other individual based criteria.
if you think the above is political correctness gone too far then you can fuck off to the daily mail comments section.
In my experience, financial analysts generally think clearer and make more logical decisions, versus the average member of the general public who thinks pretty much whatever Hollywood and primetime TV shows tell them to think at that moment.
It never was a big issue. It was just something used by the media to make HIV/AIDS look as though it wasn’t a “gay” disease. There have been about 15,000 cases of HIV caused by transfusion in the US, vs. 1.8 million overall cases (i.e. less than 1%). But nearly all of those transfusion cases occurred before gay men were restricted from donating blood. So it’s not as though you can say that such rules were backward or misguided. They likely had some real efficacy and helped to contain the disease (AIDS testing of blood donations began a couple of years later, but tests then were not nearly as effective as today so the decline likely cannot be fully attributed to that).
I don’t see how lifting the ban on gay men would significantly reduce any blood “shortages”. The reality is that homosexuals comprise just 2-3% of the population and lesbians were not restricted from donating, so you’re only looking at maybe 1% of the population or so. Less when you consider that the restriction lasted just 12 months after gay sex.
While it may not be as important today to limit these transfusions, it is politically correct (and factually incorrect) to say that this was a misguided policy going back over the past 30 years.
If a gay dude wants to infect the world, all he has to do is to lie about having had sex with men for the last 12 months. Today he has to lie about being gay. What is the difference?
I was prohibited from giving blood for 12 months after I had traveled to India. I don’t know how scientific that is - I could have easily lied about my travel. Worse, there could be Indian superbugs hiding in my body after 12 months and will burst out when I donate, to infect the rest of the world.
I guess they are hoping that people who donate blood are somewhat philanthropic, or at least not misanthropic enough to lie about their eligibility.
Bottom line, I think the ban was full of loopholes anyway. No difference one way or another.
^ So why ban those with active infections? They could lie anyway. Of course that’s not the point. Its about risk management. There is an assumption people will lie and the system is not perfect.
Yes, they are higher, but for the reasons I outlined; the probability of two people sharing a given partner in the gay community is ~15x higher than it is in the heterosexual population.