Inferior Blood: If it's OK to reject blood from gay men, what about blacks?

[TalkingDog]

A good example of how policies, put into place ostensibly to protect the whole, end up being used as tools to marginalize and alienate those considered "undesirable" because they are placed outside of the mainstream.


http://www.slate.com/id/2257655/

Sounds crazy, right? But we already exclude blood on the basis of African origin. In 1983, the FDA ruled out donations from anyone who had lived in Haiti after 1977. Then it extended this prohibition to sub-Saharan Africa. Today, the Red Cross informs prospective donors that under FDA rules, "Persons who were born in or lived in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger and Nigeria since 1977 cannot be blood donors."

This isn't racial animus. It's just blunt math, based on the increased risk of a particular HIV type in these populations. The FDA has a similarly coarse rule against blood from anyone who has spent half a year in the United Kingdom, based on the threat of mad-cow disease. The problem isn't racism; it's the crudity of treating individuals according to group membership. Where does it end? When the FDA barred Haitian blood, Haitian groups asked why black Americans, whose HIV rate was higher than that of Haitians, weren't similarly excluded. It was a good question, and it was never answered.

We don't have to keep going down this road. Instead of rejecting people based on group membership, we can assess them as individuals. It's fine to ask them about factors known to affect the risk of infection: travel, promiscuity, condom use, drug abuse, piercings, tattoos, whatever. But the evaluation of these factors has to be more nuanced than a categorical exclusion. And the surest measure of each individual's risk is a blood test. Even the FDA concedes that "today's highly sensitive tests fail to detect less than one in a million HIV-infected donors."s.

[Warpy]

1. You're confusing inferiority with contagion

and the reason blood from gay donors has been rejected is because of the epidemic in the 80s of HIV among gay men in this country.

We now have a decent test for HIV and the disease has moved well beyond the original population of gay men, so the ban is no longer appropriate.

The blood is not "inferior." It was deemed potentially contagious with a life threatening disease back in the bad old days when our tests for the virus were ineffective.

[TalkingDog]

2. uMMM...Read the Article. Their title not mine. n/t

[stray cat]

3. How about South Americans - would you like T cruzi in your blood supply?

I am not against preventing infectious diseases from the blood supply

[TalkingDog]

10. Me either. What I'm against, specifically, is dangerous discrimination.

If you are going to use a medical standard of X% increase in chances of infected blood based on Y factor. Then ANY person of Y factor should not be allowed to donate.

Blacks (Yb) are allowed even though they have similar X to gays(Yg).

The upshot is: The Red Cross is allowing political correctness to endanger the blood supply. Their reasons for allowing Yb blood and not Yg blood are not based on science, but political pressure.

[TZ]

4. You know that people who have traveled to parts of the world

where there are infectious disease outbreaks are barred from donating blood for a certain length of time. This article is stupid and biased and has NO SCIENTIFIC basis. Is the Red Cross biased agaisnt English people? Europeans of a certain time are thought to be at risk for Kreutsfeld-Jacob disease (from mad cow) aren't allowed to donate EITHER. Nor are certain people with the Hep B vaccine.
While the gay ban is out of date, the original reasons for it had to do with science not bigotry.
Aye carumba. :banghead:

[TalkingDog]

8. Are any of you actually reading the Article I posted?

It specifically mentions the ban on Europeans (and 6 month + visitors) for Mad Cow.

Which draws the rest of your argument and discussion under suspicion.

[dipsydoodle]

5. This came up recently

and I said "cut me and I bleed"

So - ditto.

[ashling]

6. My dad was a Navy doctor at the end of WWII

stationed at a VA hospital in Jackson MS. He was in charge of the blood bank during part of his time there. He said that they were supposed to keep the blood segregated by color. It was all red, so he always put it in the same place.

[RaleighNCDUer]

11. Great story! nt

[seabeyond]

7. i think it is ridiculous bullshit and totally offensive when i found out a year ago that

a gays blood was still refused. i figured they were long past that. to hear it is still in place totally offends me and bothers me.

[ismnotwasm]

9. It is offensive and it is bullshit.

I have a friend at work--the proverbial Nice Christan Boy, who happens to be Gay. He stopped donating blood, although he did for a while.

I can't donate blood because I often do dialysis on patients with known infections, the HCV or HIV among others. I have potential exposure to infected blood every time I hook someone up. It's never happened to me thank goodness, but I do understand--way more than I understand the ban on Gays.