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Since it is anonymous, people are more honest than you'd think. The risk still exists but it is smaller than you'd think. Plus, diagnostics have developed to the point where we are pretty good at testing for HIV. The problem is that plasma donations get pooled so by the time it gets tested it's a whole lot of loving plasma. That's some serious cash. During the '80s and even into the early '90s, blood banks saved cash by not testing. International commerce and the American love-affair with litigation has helped curb the whole "see no evil" aspect of it. It's not entirely gone, but the French, British and German groups have all (to varying degrees) owned up and apologized for their missteps in a way that some prominent American groups have not. What all of them them don't want is a discussion about what happened during the '80s. So they'll do whatever they can to not rock the boat. It's gonna be just a small step behind society because otherwise, it's gonna be a lot of dirty laundry.
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Dec 24, 2014 06:59
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Shbobdb posted:Since it is anonymous, people are more honest than you'd think. It's not anonymous when there are company blood drives and other such events and people who actually donate get things indicating such. And social pressure to conform and do it along with everyone else, especially when many other disqualifying potential actions clearly didn't happen (say getting a tattoo) or would themselves be considered bad things (say, doing intravenous illegal drugs).
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Dec 24, 2014 08:31
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Nintendo Kid posted:It's not anonymous when there are company blood drives and other such events and people who actually donate get things indicating such. And social pressure to conform and do it along with everyone else, especially when many other disqualifying potential actions clearly didn't happen (say getting a tattoo) or would themselves be considered bad things (say, doing intravenous illegal drugs). That's why at the very end they have the barcode stickers and you pick "use my blood" or "toss that poo poo, yo" so people who still get needle-stuck out of social pressure can clandestinely let the Red Cross know.
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Dec 24, 2014 09:10
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Sure, company blood drives normally go into the "high" risk pool for that reason. It isn't a perfect system, especially after a disaster, but it is a problem that blood banks are aware of. Edit: See above for another commonly used solution  I'm more familiar with plasma donation than blood.
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Dec 24, 2014 09:11
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VitalSigns posted:can clandestinely let the Red Cross know. Hey Red Cross, let me clandestinely let you know to throw away my perfectly good clean HIV negative blood because I initially lied to you about sucking cock.
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Dec 24, 2014 11:49
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Hey now, it's for people whole are clandestinely gay, prostitutes or needle drug users, thank-you-very-much. It's a good policy, since homosexuality represents a moral hazard on par with prostitution and needle drugs, right?
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Dec 24, 2014 11:52
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I don't agree with the policy barring men who have sex with men. I'm pointing out that the Red Cross does have a way for people who feel socially pressured to give blood at a workplace blood drive to still self-report without having to face awkward questions. The line of argument that MSM will just lie anyway seems (1) a negative portrayal of MSM and (2) like an attack on the whole system of self-reporting. I don't know how often the "don't use" barcode is chosen though; are you implying never?
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Dec 24, 2014 12:04
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I think it's a great option! Much better than what happens with plasma. I'm just joking around. Given the climate of blood donation, this is a great step forward.
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Dec 24, 2014 12:17
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Shbobdb posted:I think it's a great option! Much better than what happens with plasma. I'm just joking around. Given the climate of blood donation, this is a great step forward. I think the pattern on official support for Gay Rights has always been to replace a really terrible policy with a still terrible but better policy, which provokes discussion and political activism. When public opinion is ready then the not-as-terrible policy can be replaced with something reasonable. Don't Ask Don't Tell played out like this.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:30
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What's the proposed better policy? Combined with the idea of having an option just between you and the donation group to let them know about it (also I think that blood can still be used for research, I know botched donations are over here if they miss the vein) the honesty policy seems like a good place. Even if you want to stay quiet about your sexual orientation for whatever reason, having the question there and an explanation of why it's there (which is provided at UK blood donation sessions) helps people in high risk categories to decide if they really should donate. For example, we also have a rule here for people who have been sexually active in parts of Africa, because that's also a place with a high risk of HIV. And I agree with that rule for the same reason.
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Dec 25, 2014 03:21
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but gay sex isn't the issue so much as having anal is, right? Why then, isn't the question not just "have you had anal sex in the past [ however long ]" coupled with "have you had sex with someone that has had anal sex in the past year, in the past year"?
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Dec 25, 2014 03:32
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:Correct me if I'm wrong, but gay sex isn't the issue so much as having anal is, right? Why then, isn't the question not just "have you had anal sex in the past [ however long ]" coupled with "have you had sex with someone that has had anal sex in the past year, in the past year"? Well here's the thing: a woman who has had sex with a dude who had sex with a dude : one year deferment A dude does it once? Lifetime deferral, despite the fact it's very very easy for an hiv positive dude to transmit it to a woman.
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Dec 25, 2014 03:34
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Nintendo Kid posted:Well here's the thing: a woman who has had sex with a dude who had sex with a dude : one year deferment That is a bit silly yeah, I think over here it got moved from that to 1 year for both.
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Dec 25, 2014 03:39
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:Correct me if I'm wrong, but gay sex isn't the issue so much as having anal is, right? Why then, isn't the question not just "have you had anal sex in the past [ however long ]" coupled with "have you had sex with someone that has had anal sex in the past year, in the past year"? The scientific issue is high risk activities. Two dudes having unprotected anal intercourse, sharing IV drug needles, and so on. But another issue is the public perception of how safe the blood supply is. That's why you get really restrictive policies, since you also don't want idiot people dying because they refused a transfusion to avoid catching The Gay.
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Dec 25, 2014 04:21
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:Correct me if I'm wrong, but gay sex isn't the issue so much as having anal is, right? Why then, isn't the question not just "have you had anal sex in the past [ however long ]" coupled with "have you had sex with someone that has had anal sex in the past year, in the past year"? I wonder if a major part of the issue is simply that the Red Cross thinks it's crossing a line to ask about specific sex acts. It feels like a less intrusive question to simply ask if a man has had male sex partners, then to inquire about specific sex acts, particularly since blood donation occurs with a total stranger rather than a regularly visited health professional. I mean, theoretically you could get really specific: do you regularly use condoms? How often do you have sex? Are you in a committed relationship? How many sex partners did you have last year? That would make it more "valid", but would that actually make gay people more comfortable to have such an intrusive questionnaire at the hands of a stranger? Periodiko fucked around with this message at 09:43 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 09:41
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Periodiko posted:I wonder if a major part of the issue is simply that the Red Cross thinks it's crossing a line to ask about specific sex acts. It feels like a less intrusive question to simply ask if a man has had male sex partners, then to inquire about specific sex acts, particularly since blood donation occurs with a total stranger rather than a regularly visited health professional. I mean, theoretically you could get really specific: do you regularly use condoms? How often do you have sex? Are you in a committed relationship? How many sex partners did you have last year? That would make it more "valid", but would that actually make gay people more comfortable to have such an intrusive questionnaire at the hands of a stranger? Perhaps putting all of the questions under a blanket yes/no tickbox? I know ours has a different ticky box for every possible sex-related disqualifier, but if you lumped it in with say, the tattoo clauses and just had a 'tick if any of the above apply to you' box it might help preserve a degree of nonspecificness? Though I guess then you might have people with recent tattoos lying because they don't want the nurse to think they're a devious sodomite.
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Dec 25, 2014 09:49
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:Correct me if I'm wrong, but gay sex isn't the issue so much as having anal is, right? Why then, isn't the question not just "have you had anal sex in the past [ however long ]" coupled with "have you had sex with someone that has had anal sex in the past year, in the past year"? Nope, anal sex is only a very small part of the issue. Anal sex is somewhat higher risk for HIV transmission than vaginal sex with equal level of protection, but you have to be having sex with an HIV positive individual to contract HIV, and recent estimates are that ~8% of men who have had sec with men in the last five years have HIV (roughly 45x the rate in women). Also, cdc estimates that ~35% of MSM who have HIV don't know that they are infected. It's really not the anal or physical act of gay sex that makes gay sex an HIV risk, it's the high proportion of infection in gay men driving a high rate of new infections driving a high proportion of new infections. With an epidemic rate of HIV infection I can see why the FDA put the exclusion in place. I'd love to see better targeting though, since it is also risks perpetrating stigma. In my ideal world anyone who wished to donate blood, gay or straight, would first be given a battery of tests and then be required to get retested at any point that they report having more than one sexual partner in the past year, and disqualified if their partner is positive for a restricting std. Of course that would be prohibitively expensive  hopefully they'll find a way to get a monogamy clause to work with gay men.
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Dec 25, 2014 14:32
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Lutha Mahtin posted:That's why you get really restrictive policies, since you also don't want idiot people dying because they refused a transfusion to avoid catching The Gay. How is this line any different than the idiots who separated the blood supply by race to avoid catching The Black? I'm honestly fine with some homophobe dying because he wouldn't take LGBT blood, just like I'd be fine with a racist dying because they wouldn't take black blood. I'd offer blood to either, but if that's really the hill that the want to die on, I'm more than willing to let them. If we want to be scientific, ban anyone who's had any anal sex for the last year, but people are somehow convinced men's asses are more fragile or susceptible or something. In reality it's just bigotry and trying to make sure that we don't see how many straight people have "deviant" sex, which might help normalize it. rkajdi fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 14:56
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rkajdi posted:Ho is this line any different than the idiots who separated the blood supply by race to avoid catching The Black? It's not, but public health is a field where slightly changing a policy can affect who lives or dies, and (in the US at least) these agencies are often very underfunded and subject to arbitrary restrictions imposed by politicians. So public health officials are left with the lovely choice of trying to promote the greatest number of healthy people with a limited outreach budget and a bunch of things they're not allowed to talk about, and thus you sometimes get wacky policies that on the surface don't seem logical or scientific.
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Dec 25, 2014 15:52
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rkajdi posted:How is this line any different than the idiots who separated the blood supply by race to avoid catching The Black? I'm honestly fine with some homophobe dying because he wouldn't take LGBT blood, just like I'd be fine with a racist dying because they wouldn't take black blood. I'd offer blood to either, but if that's really the hill that the want to die on, I'm more than willing to let them. Sadly, monumentally stupid people do have a right to live as well. That is a basic human right afforded to everyone who isn't foreign or a pervert or the police think they look funny.
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Dec 25, 2014 17:01
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OwlFancier posted:Sadly, monumentally stupid people do have a right to live as well. That is a basic human right afforded to everyone who isn't foreign or a pervert or the police think they look funny. I'm not denying them a right to live. I just don't feel bad if they don't want medical treatment because of the black/queer blood they'd get. There's absolutely no reason to accommodate them, in fact lots of positive reasons to not accommodate them. Like showing lots of people that LGBT people aren't somehow dirty with unclean blood.
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Dec 25, 2014 17:26
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Making an example of the ignorant, while entertaining, is possibly not an ideal precedent for the healthcare services to be setting, however. You can argue quite accurately that stopping stupid people from getting themselves killed is 90% of the job of the health services.
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Dec 25, 2014 17:29
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OwlFancier posted:Making an example of the ignorant, while entertaining, is possibly not an ideal precedent for the healthcare services to be setting, however. You're not making an example of them, they're free to live in the real modern world instead of whatever pre-modern dirt farming fantasy they've set up for themselves. Again, we stopped dividing blood by races because it had no valid reason, even though I'm sure a few hold out folks died because they refuse black blood. The good outweighed the bad, and honestly I think you'll find few if any of the bigots will stick with their guns and die on principles. Accommodating bigots is how we ended up in the situations we currently have, and it's what we have to stop doing. Your strategy is to continue to coddle a bunch of ignorant people, instead of forcing them into reality or just replacing them with better people via aging. Coddling them (i.e. not educating their children into better people) just allows the crap to go on into the future.
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Dec 25, 2014 17:42
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I'd sooner someone thought I was an abomination unto creation than get them killed for their stupid beliefs. It is entirely irrational to believe there's something wrong with accepting blood from someone based on race or sexual orientation, but there will be people in the world who would refuse it on those grounds. They may be utterly detestable but I'd still rather not see them dead because of it.
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Dec 25, 2014 17:50
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OwlFancier posted:I'd sooner someone thought I was an abomination unto creation than get them killed for their stupid beliefs. It is entirely irrational to believe there's something wrong with accepting blood from someone based on race or sexual orientation, but there will be people in the world who would refuse it on those grounds. So you're fine with racial separation of blood too, from the way you're saying things? At some point you have to stop coddling these people or they'll always be with you. Sorry, I want my generation to be the last one that has to deal with this poo poo, and I'm willing to let pre-moderns make martyrs of themselves if they want. Unless we've done something to not allow people to deny medical treatment recently, I figure it's their right to be dumb. Of course I don't expect anyone to actually die from this, since true believers like these guys are cowards at heart and will fold like a cheap suit once they'd actually have to die from it. We see it all the time with abortions, and the stakes are way lower there for people.
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Dec 25, 2014 18:07
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OwlFancier posted:I'd sooner someone thought I was an abomination unto creation than get them killed for their stupid beliefs. It is entirely irrational to believe there's something wrong with accepting blood from someone based on race or sexual orientation, but there will be people in the world who would refuse it on those grounds. And we already decided "hey gently caress you" for people who refuse it on racial terms, so why the gently caress not on sexuality terms? Plus it's not like the blood is going to come in a bag marked GAY BLOOD in the first place, so the people you're saying we need to protect may well already believe the gays have infected all the blood and are already refusing it.
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Dec 25, 2014 18:43
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Refusing blood from certain populations that are much more likely to have tainted blood and only represent 2% of the population is common sense.visceril posted:I'm gonna guess remove completely because panels of experts don't have to face political pressure from republicans Actually the only reason to remove it is political pressure from the left. It's very simple, why are you going to sample from populations with high risk (the stats are still very clear on this) when you can meet your needs through lower risk populations. Nintendo Kid posted:Well here's the thing: a woman who has had sex with a dude who had sex with a dude : one year deferment Right, it's called "statistics". Namely even if the risks were the same (they are not) excluding women knocks out half your population while excluding men having sex with men is maybe 2%. tsa fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 19:00
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tsa posted:
No you aren't getting it child. Unless you sincerely believe all women have had sex with men who have had sex with men, in which case you get your ideas about the human race from some strange subcategory of porn.
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Dec 25, 2014 19:08
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spacetoaster posted:Oh they were all for continuing the ban. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/fda-panel-gay-blood-donation-ban Yea : quote:Yet that modest step was too much for the FDA's experts, who wrapped up last week's meeting without voting on the proposal. "There's too many questions in science that aren't answerable," one panelist concluded. "It sounds to me like we're talking about policy and civil rights rather than our primary duty, which is transfusion safety," noted another. This should just be about the science, and the science is pretty clear right now: it isn't worth the risk. The thing is we have plenty of blood. Why on earth would you sample from riskier populations when your needs are being met in a way that is both statistically and empirically safe. You need to be really loving sure when you make these sorts of changes. It's a time when you can and should be extremely conservative - we just don't need some evidence that the change is justified, we need to be basically 100% goddamn sure on this issue. Which is exactly why the panel made the recommendations they did. Nintendo Kid posted:No you aren't getting it child. Unless you sincerely believe all women have had sex with men who have had sex with men, in which case you get your ideas about the human race from some strange subcategory of porn. Actually the experts agree with me, friend.
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Dec 25, 2014 19:18
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tsa posted:
The experts do not agree with you that the entire female population of planet earth has had sex with men who have had sex with other men.
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Dec 25, 2014 19:37
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tsa does the fact that pressure from "the left"  is working bother you? Tell us how you feel about traditional marriage.
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Dec 25, 2014 20:17
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Nintendo Kid posted:Plus it's not like the blood is going to come in a bag marked GAY BLOOD in the first place Man I would totally go for the GAY BLOOD, that means I'd be a half-vampire right?
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Dec 25, 2014 21:19
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Lutha Mahtin posted:Man I would totally go for the GAY BLOOD, that means I'd be a half-vampire right? You'd sparkle under disco lights.
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Dec 25, 2014 21:45
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The HIV infection rate is 8x as high in African-Americans as it is in whites. Should we be restricting blood donation by race as well?
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Dec 26, 2014 01:10
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It's OK, part of the reason why is because whites got slaughtered by the Black Death and HIV often uses the same receptor. Natural selection had made us immune.
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Dec 26, 2014 01:57
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Richard Cory posted:The HIV infection rate is 8x as high in African-Americans as it is in whites. Should we be restricting blood donation by race as well? I dunno, maybe go do all the math that public health people do and report back (don't report back).
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Dec 26, 2014 02:00
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Public health officials didn't really do any math to come up with the lifetime ban in the first place, it was straight up "gays have a mysterious disease that goes through blood, we can barely test for it, ban it because it's the mid 80s and we hate gays anyway".
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Dec 26, 2014 02:02
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The math is faulty to begin with, since HIV screenings can catch it after six weeks (and that's shrinking as the technology gets better and better). A window period of six weeks not only makes complete medical sense, but would not be nearly the same burden as not having sex for a whole year. Until we can accurately screen for HIV within a period of days as other STIs are, I think a six-week period would be a much better starting point & it's one that the Red Cross agrees with.
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Dec 26, 2014 02:20
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Nintendo Kid posted:No you aren't getting it child. Unless you sincerely believe all women have had sex with men who have had sex with men, in which case you get your ideas about the human race from some strange subcategory of porn. Haven't over a third of men had a homosexual experience? And women often have more than one partner in their lives so it actually doesn't seem implausible to me that a majority of women have had sex with men who have had sex with men even once since 1973 or whatever the rule used to be.
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Dec 26, 2014 02:25
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It's actually a lot worse than that. It was, "There is a mysterious disease going around and we can prevent it from contaminating the blood supply by testing for Hepatitis. But that would cost a lot of money, so we'll just ignore it for a while." After a bunch of people got AIDS from blood transfusions, people started freaking out and the blood bankers took the cheapest route. It wasn't "gently caress the gays", it was an unfortunate side-effect of capitalism and gays got caught in the crossfire. It's continued because blood bankers don't want to have another discussion about how they knowingly let people get AIDS to save them some cash.
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Dec 26, 2014 02:27
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