Gay Blood Donations Likely to be Lifted

IF gay men are more promiscuous and AIDS etc is more common among gay men, why should there be a risk when donating blood? It should stay banned

There are a lot of 'loose' heterosexual people, of both genders, who pose a higher risk.

Thank God this nonsense is finally being done away with.



Exactly. The fact that AIDS is still viewed as a gay disease is not only unseemly but extremely ignorant.

Y'know when over half the AIDS patients in this country are gay, and anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 gays have AIDS, it is perfectly reasonable not to allow their blood to contaminate the supply... I don't see why people have to assume the decision to disallow them to donate was because people were scared of catching teh gay, rather than being a rationally sound medical decision. There are whole categories of people who pose far less risk who are also banned; Such as people who have had a tattoo in the last year, injected yourself with a drug ever, or if you've spent a long period of time abroad. It's just safety.

Few people are denying the rationale at the time, when AIDS wasn't very widely known about and was a much larger problem in the gay community, and when screening for it was a lot less reliable. I certainly wouldn't suggest that it was a homophobic piece of legislation at the time. However, that was 20-30 years ago, and I think the legislation has become somewhat outdated. Now that there are fewer new cases of HIV in the gay community each year, and now that screening has got much better, there's less of a reason to keep the blanket ban.

How ridiculous. The ban should stay

Few people are denying the rationale at the time, when AIDS wasn't very widely known about and was a much larger problem in the gay community, and when screening for it was a lot less reliable. I certainly wouldn't suggest that it was a homophobic piece of legislation at the time. However, that was 20-30 years ago, and I think the legislation has become somewhat outdated. Now that there are fewer new cases of HIV in the gay community each year, and now that screening has got much better, there's less of a reason to keep the blanket ban.

Y'know when over half the AIDS patients in this country are gay, and anywhere from 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 gays have AIDS, it is perfectly reasonable not to allow their blood to contaminate the supply... I don't see why people have to assume the decision to disallow them to donate was because people were scared of catching teh gay, rather than being a rationally sound medical decision. There are whole categories of people who pose far less risk who are also banned; Such as people who have had a tattoo in the last year, injected yourself with a drug ever, or if you've spent a long period of time abroad. It's just safety.

Depends on the test, and the window period (which is different for different types of test).

If you do the combined ELISA and Western Blot test procedure, which is what they use for initial diagnosis, accuracy is about 99% with about twice as many false positives as false negatives.

I know this because I got a false positive once. Fortunately for me when they did the follow-up tests they discovered what had happened.

Not sure which test they use for screening blood donations. I know in the US they use the PCR test which is more accurate, but that's quite expensive.

Vaniushingly slim, if transmission took place more than 6 months before; still very slim, but less so, if 3-6 months before; fairly good if <3 months before.

Bans on high risk groups are, to a certain extent, a belt-and-braces approach. Transmission of HIV by blood donation is, nowadays, very rarely reported in developed settings; the last time it was reported in the USA, for instance, and the first time since 2002, was in 2008, when a chap who'd been cheating on his wife with both men and women lied on his form and wound up infecting someone receiving blood during a kidney transplant operation. However, it's also likely to be underrecognised (same article).

Wrong




Wrong

http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/03/23/gay-and-bisexual-hiv-infections-rise-70-in-ten-years/
http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/07/21/one-in-seven-men-on-london-gay-scene-thought-to-have-hiv/

If it is 2%, I would keep away from high risk groups, so keep the ban. If the chances get very slim (like much lower than 2%) after the first 6 months, I'd ban anyone who did anything that might make him high risk in the last 9 months. It may seem unfair to single out gay people, but apparently they are much higher risk than the rest of society.

That's pretty much what the one year ban would do - double up on the safe time to allow for faulty recall of dates etc.

I never understood why they thought gay men were more likely to have HIV anyway.

I never understood why they thought gay men were more likely to have HIV anyway.

You're joking, right?