FDA: Protecting blood supply from AIDS might “offend” straight people

The federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said this week that it will not ask potential blood donors about their high-risk sexual behavior, even if the questions would help ensure the safety of the nation’s blood supply from HIV/AIDS, because heterosexual donors might find the questioning “offensive.”

This, after decades of the FDA asking male blood donors if they are gay, and then asking the gay ones whether they have had sex with men at any time since the late 1970s.

Philadelphia NPR station WHYY-FM has the FDA’s incredible comment:

“Assessment of high-risk sexual behaviors would be highly burdensome on blood donation establishments and potentially offensive to donors,” the agency wrote.

The new FDA statement comes on the heels of last week’s change in the agency’s long-standing gay-ban on blood donations. Previously, no man who had had sex with even one man since the late 1970s could donate blood. Now, under the new policy, the FDA asks male donors if they’ve had sex with another man in the past 12 months.

“Does this closet look small on me?”

via Shutterstock

There have been protests against the new FDA policy, arguing that it’s outdated because blood tests can now detect HIV within weeks of exposure — so asking gay men to be celibate for a year before donating is unreasonable and unnecessary.

The protesters also asked why the FDA isn’t asking all donors about their high-risk sexual behavior — behavior that raises the chances of contracting HIV — regardless of whether the act is opposite- or same- sex. That last question is what precipitated the FDA’s new response about offending straight donors.

So to recap, the FDA believes that a total stranger asking a man if he’s gay — a highly personal, and for some embarrassing, admission that could get you fired from your job, and disowned by your family — is not “offensive.”

SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN CHALLENGES FDA GAY BLOOD BAN: 'HAVE THE COURAGE TO SET POLICIES BASED ON SCIENCE'

Last week, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) again spoke out against the FDA's new blood donation policy — accepting blood from gay men, but only those who have been abstinent for at least one year.

Through Twitter, Warren called for concrete, alternative methods of ensuring blood safety, challenging the FDA to shake up the status quo.

Here's the Tweet:

The FDA must commit to building a bigger, safer blood supply through risk-based screening & have courage to set policies based on science.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) December 24, 2014

This statement is in line with the recent letter, signed by 80 congressional Democrats including Warren, which called for "risk-based blood donation policy," and stated:

The pertinent scientific question is not whether a cross-section of the population is more likely than another to transmit an infection, but rather whether an across-the-board, risk-based screening will reduce the likelihood of all infectious contaminations.

In related news, the FDA released a statement this week saying it had considered individual self-assessments, but did not find them reliable:

"Assessment of high-risk sexual behaviors would be highly burdensome on blood donation establishments and potentially offensive to donors."

What do you think of the one-year deferral policy and the FDA's handling of the situation?

Nine Ways To Avoid Sex For The Next Year So You Can Donate A Pint Of Blood

The FDA has decided that the blood coursing through your veins isn’t a lifetime threat to the American public — just a year-long threat. So sometime next year, you can start donating blood.

Or more accurately, you can start the clock running on when you can donate blood in 2016. Because to do so, you have to avoid “sexual contact” with another man for at least a year. For your ordinary homo, never lacking in opportunity or desire, that’s an extreme challenge.

And don’t forget that sexual contact means everything because the FDA thinks everything you do is equally risky, even though it’s not.

So to donate blood, you need to get ready now, which means giving up sex for a year.

To help you meet this noble goal, here are ten tips guaranteed to strangle your libido…

1. Watch a Pat Robertson marathon.

Every night, you can spend time among the wreckage of the televangelist’s psyche by watching the hundreds of hours he’s spent on CBN. Let Pat remind you that gay sex isn’t very pretty, that you can catch AIDS from towels, and that being gay is like demonic possession. You’ll be so turned off sex or laugh so hard that the effect will be the same.

2. Take a walking tour of the deep, deep South.

You know, places like Tupelo, MS, the headquarters of the American Family Association and Bryan Fischer. Or Alabama, where you can count the number of antigay license plates you see. Or Louisiana, which refuses to remove an unconstitutional sodomy law from its books. Just be sure to stay clear of New Orleans, or you won’t be able to donate blood until 2017.

3. Visit Russia.

Yes, the land of Vladimir Putin, which has been proven to cure homosexuality (at least in the case of Gerard Depardieu). Alternately, Putin’s fellow homophobes can beat you to a pulp if they suspect you’re gay, in which case you may need blood before you can ever donate it.

4. Join the Catholic celibacy movement.

Yes, it’s officially a trend, because the mainstream media has reported on it. You can be a perfectly good Catholic by denying one of God’s greatest gifts and at the same time satisfy neither your puzzled LGBT siblings or the conservatives who would just assume purge you from the Church. But you will be able to give blood. (Obviously, celibacy doesn’t apply to priests.)

5. Become a Salvation Army officer.

Catholicism isn’t military enough for you? There’s always the Salvation Army. It’s every bit as repressive, but it comes with a uniform.

6. Borrow an Ebola quarantine tent from Chris Christie.

Want to cut yourself off from any human contact? Chris Christie has a bunch of tents left over from his disastrous (and unscientific) decision to throw a nurse who helped Ebola patients into quarantine. The downside? No cable.

7. Start swilling soy sauce.

Soy reduces testosterone levels and with it sex drive. Put soy sauce on your corn flakes in the morning, have an edamame shake for lunch, have a soy burger for dinner. After a while, you’ll probably feel nauseated as well, which will help you reach your overall goal.

8. Take up a really boring hobby.

How about collecting old phone books? Or sculpting butter? Or photographing roundabouts? (It helps if you’re British for that last one.) Plus as a bonus, you can shop at Hobby Lobby and contribute to the erosion of LGBT rights at the same time!

9. Become a Republican. 

Never mind. No one’s that desperate to donate blood.

FDA Panel Endorses Lifetime Ban on Gay Blood Donation, Suggests Gay Men Are Diseased Liars

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration’s Blood Products Advisory Panel met to discuss lifting the government’s 31-year-old ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men. Currently, any man who has had sexual contact with another man since 1977—even once, even using condoms—is barred for life from donating blood. The ban was instituted in 1983 in the early days of the AIDS crisis, when HIV testing was still rudimentary. It hasn’t been altered since.

There was some hope that the panel might support a policy recently endorsed by a nearly unanimous Department of Health and Human Services panel, which would allow gay men to donate blood if they’d been celibate for one year. But even that half-measure appeared to be too much for the panel, which closed its discussion without taking a formal vote. (The panel itself can’t make rules, but the FDA takes its suggestions very seriously when issuing guidelines.)

The panel’s refusal to advise replacing the lifetime ban with a one-year deferral—twinned with its craven refusal to go on the record as opposing it—is deeply irritating. Even more galling is its reasoning, or lack thereof: It’s clear that the advisers on the panel saw the campaign to lift the blood ban as more a political crusade than a scientific appeal. (Apparently, they haven’t checked in with American Red Cross, America's Blood Centers, the American Association of Blood Banks, and the American Medical Association, all of which oppose the ban.) “It sounds to me like we're talking about policy and civil rights” rather than safety and science, one adviser scoffed. Another anxiously described lowering the ban as “a leap of faith.”

This language is quite curious. The advisers were not considering abolishing the gay blood ban altogether; they were simply considering replacing it with a new ban that forces gay men to be celibate for a year before donating. Their stated opposition to gay blood donation is a fear that HIV-positive men will donate. But every blood donation is tested for HIV, and the virus can now be detected within weeks of infection. If gay men were celibate for a year before their donation, how could they possibly carry an increased risk for HIV? If they were already HIV-negative prior to a year of celibacy, how could they even have HIV at all?

Parse this chain of reasoning, and the Blood Products Advisory Panel’s true fear is obvious: It is afraid gay men will lie. The advisers won’t support a one-year deferral because they believe gay men will lie about how long they’ve been celibate in order to donate blood. There’s just no other way to justify opposition to a one-year deferral.

The panel’s skepticism might make sense if the FDA took a generally wary approach toward blood donation. But it doesn’t, to an almost comical degree. Under the current policies, a straight person who had sex with a prostitute of the opposite sex can give blood one year later. So can a straight person who had sex with an HIV-positive opposite-sex partner. Straight people who frequently have unprotected sex with multiple anonymous opposite-sex partners face no deferral at all. The FDA doesn’t seem concerned that any of these people will lie about their sexual behaviors.

Now, what do all of these lucky folks have in common that might make the FDA trust them? Ah, yes: They’re all straight. Ask a straight man whether he’s had sex with a prostitute in the last 12 months, and you can take his answer as the gospel truth. Ask a gay man if he’s had sex with anyone in the last 12 months—even his husband—and, well, you really just can’t take those people at their word, can you?

This treatment is very much in line with the FDA’s general attitude toward gay men, which is that they are diseased, irresponsible, and untrustworthy. Last August, a 16-year-old gay kid who committed suicide was forbidden from donating his eyeballs under FDA guidelines; the organization bars tissue donation from men who had sex with men less than five years before death, and the teen’s mom couldn’t prove he was celibate. When I heard the news of that horrific indignity, I didn’t think the organization could be any more dismissively disdainful of gay men. As it turns out, I was dead wrong.

Why the FDA Bans Gays From Donating Blood—Despite All Medical Evidence

Motivated to donate blood after a sick friend with a rare blood type put out a plea, Blake Lynch tried to help but ended up walking out of a clinic, embarrassed.

After asking if he'd ever prostituted himself for money or drugs, the clinic's survey asked, “[Have you] had sexual contact with another male, even once?”

As a gay man, he had.

In 1983, the FDA began banning men who have had sex with other men at any time since 1977  (believed to be the year the AIDS epidemic began in the United States), from donating blood.

Lynch found the long-established rule, previously unknown to him, staggering.

“This policy thinks that I’m this dirty individual who is HIV positive, and that’s not true,” he said.

It wasn't the first time Lynch had faced harsh rebuke for his sexual identity. During his teenage years, he was sent to Exodus International, a group that provided therapy to turn gay Christians into heterosexuals. 

“It never really worked for me, and I didn't want it to work,” Lynch said.

At 22, the fed-up nursing student started a petition to overturn the FDA policy through the Banned4Life project, and he has been organizing blood drives for the past year. The events encourage eligible donors to give blood in place of gay men while educating them about the ban.

When it comes to donation restrictions, not much has changed since the U.S. Public Health Service warned that HIV, a big mystery in the 1980s, was transmitted through blood.

In 1990, at least 50,000 college students, factory workers, and families marched in New York City to protest the FDA’s announcement that Haitians were banned from donating blood. The government's argument was bolstered by data that AIDS was primarily transmitted through heterosexual sex in Haiti, which made it harder to identify high-risk individuals. The agency was soon forced to acknowledge that the policy, an effort to simplify donor exclusions, was “not subjected to close scientific scrutiny.” The FDA retracted the ban in less than a year.

Today, many countries have donor restrictions similar to those of the U.S., but because of recent medical evidence that it could no longer be justified, the ban has been lifted in Canada, South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Japan, and other countries. Instead, these countries have imposed a deferment window between having sex with other men and donating blood. In the United Kingdom, where the deferment period is one year, there has been no reported HIV infection through blood transfusion since 2002. The FDA estimates that in the U.S., the risk of contracting HIV from a unit of blood is one in 2 million.

Elizabeth Warren and 86 Members of Congress Demand an End to the FDA’s Gay Blood Donor Ban

"Led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and a group of 87 members of Congress sent a letter has sent a letter to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’ demanding that they lift the ban on blood donors who are “men who have had sex with other men , at any time since 1977,” a policy the FDA has had in place since the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis in 1992.

“Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic more than 30 years ago, the scientific community’s understanding of the virus has changed dramatically. We have seen vast advances in blood screening technology, blood donation policy changes in other countries allowing MSM to donate, and opposition from our nation’s blood banks who have called the current ban ‘medically and scientifically unwarranted. Our current policies turn away healthy, willing donors even when we face serious blood shortages. Further, the existing lifetime ban continues to perpetuate inaccurate stereotypes about gay and bisexual men, and fosters an atmosphere that promotes discrimination and discourages individuals from from seeking HIV testing and treatment services.” Full story here!