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By Brody Levesque (Washington DC) June 22 | Gay activists angered by the decision made earlier this month by the U. S. Department of Health & Human Services' Advisory Committee on Blood Safety & Availability, that left a 1983 ban in place designed to prevent to prevent HIV-AIDS from entering the blood donation supply, [It officially prohibits any man who has had sex with another man since 1977 from donating.], are now advocating that healthy Gay men, "If Asked-Don't Tell."
One activist said;
"I personally know a number of men who have sex with other men and regularly donate blood. It's simply a matter of not telling. These are healthy & responsible people who don't have unprotected sex with unknown partners, and they're thoroughly tested. There is zero risk of them carrying any STDs. They're simply saving more lives than if they were to follow the letter of the law. I'm sure there's quite a few like them, and it'd be quite a shock to the gay-hating community if it was revealed how little HIV-positive blood are in the banks despite this."
The Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability voted 9-6 continuing the Gay blood ban in place after a two day hearing on the ban which included testimony by noted Anti-Gay activist Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council and U. S. Senator John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts.
A key point of contention was the disparate treatment of gays, who incur a lifetime ban for a single sex act even years in the past, and heterosexual men or women, who are required to defer giving blood for only one year if they have sex with someone with HIV.
Senator Kerry testified that:
"This lingering policy is responsible for turning away thousands of healthy donors from blood clinics across the country, not because they have engaged in highly risky behavior, but because they are gay," Kerry testified. "This is blood that could save lives."
Peter Sprigg, FRC's Senior Fellow for Policy Studies, offered testimony to the panel prior to the vote, urging that the current policy be maintained.
After the vote, Sprigg said,
"Commonsense has triumphed over political correctness, an increasingly rare but very welcome occurrence. This panel heard a day and a half of testimony, including the latest research on HIV risks in the blood supply, but in the end they recognized that there is no alternative screening policy that can be shown to maintain the safety of the nation's blood supply."
In his testimony, Sprigg noted,
"The principal motivation of those who seek a change in the current policy is to reduce what they perceive as 'discrimination' against homosexual or bisexual men. ... However, the blood donation policy does not exist to serve socio-political purposes, nor should it be changed to advance them."
Acknowledging that uneven treatment, the Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability said the current donor system is "suboptimal" because it permits "some potentially high-risk donations while preventing some potentially low-risk donations." It unanimously recommended a series of steps to guide health authorities in moving to a more nuanced policy that would take into account individual behavior, rather than assessing the characteristics of a broad group — such as men who have sex with men.
Recommendations include studying whether questionnaires filled out by would-be donors can be fine-tuned to identify gay men who are not high risk, as well as heterosexuals who are high risk and not weeded out by the current system.
In his Human Nature column yesterday, Slate columnist William Saletan asked 'If it's OK to reject blood from gay men, what about blacks?'
Saletan writes:
"Maybe you fooled around with a guy 30 years ago and have spent the rest of your life as a celibate priest. Maybe you've been in a faithful same-sex marriage for 40 years. Maybe you've passed an HIV test. It doesn't matter. You can't give blood, because you're in the wrong "group." On the other hand, if you're in the right group—heterosexuals—you can give blood despite dangerous behavior. If you had sex with a prostitute, an IV drug user, and an HIV-positive opposite-sex partner 13 months ago, you're good to go."
He then compares and contrast the numbers of risks and factors that according to the Centers for Disease Control:
HIV prevalence is eight to nine times higher among blacks than among whites, and HIV incidence (the rate of new infections in a given year) is seven times higher. For black women, HIV prevalence is 18 times higher than for white women.
And these numbers understate the likely difference in risk to the blood supply. A recent CDC analysis of MSM [Men Having Sex With Men] in five cities found that while only 18 percent of the HIV-infected white men were unaware of their infections, 67 percent of the infected black men were unaware. If the awareness gap between blacks and whites overall is even half as great as it was among the men in this study—i.e., if blacks are twice as likely as whites to be unaware that they're infected, and therefore more likely to try to donate infected blood—then theoretically, black donors are just as risky as MSM donors.
Saletan then opines :
"Is race a less legitimate basis for exclusion than sexual orientation is? Race is immutable, but plenty of evidence suggests that homosexuality is immutable, too. Technically, the MSM exclusion isn't a gay exclusion: You can be gay as long as you don't have sex with other men. A parallel policy, applied to race, would be that you can be black as long as you don't have sex with other blacks. After all, the No. 1 reason you're more likely to get infected by a gay man than by a straight one is the already high prevalence of HIV among gay men. The same is true of the higher infection risk among blacks."
In conclusion he noted that the American Plasma Users Coalition, whose testimony strongly influenced the committee had stated;
"By their very nature, blood donor screening and deferral criteria are discriminatory; however, they are justifiable when they provide increased protection to public health. Criteria for donor deferrals must put safety of the recipient first and be based on scientific and epidemiological evidence about large groups of people."
There are those who feel that the decision was capricious and arbitrary influenced more by theoretical political thought than scientific basis and that if a person takes appropriate measures to insure that they have safe sex irrespective of their 'orientation' or even 'race' then they should be able to give blood including maintaining silence on the questionnaires regarding the 'Gay' questions.
The question therefore becomes- Can the blood supply be safeguarded solely by scientific means and not by the honesty or lack thereof by individuals?
William Saletan Photo By Slate.com
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