I thought the US still had some sort of 3 month restriction, but I don’t recall if that’s just for new partners or not.
Maybe Canada is leap-frogging over the US.
It does seem more than a little crazy when they’re screening every donation for presence of HIV that they continue to discriminate. What made sense in 1983 when there was no way to screen and what makes sense in 2022 are not the same at all.
That said, I admittedly don’t know how good the screen is. How likely is it that the blood of a person who only recently contracted HIV would test negative and then infect the recipient(s)?
Some doctors I know have advised my gay friends to just lie and say you haven’t had sex with men in a good while. It’s not like it matters. They screen the blood regardless and it’s not something they can verify anyway.
I’m reading it can take 18-45 days after infection for blood to test positive, even blood drawn from a vein (up to 90 days for blood from a finger prick).
So there’s maybe some logic in not taking blood from someone who’d had a new sex partner in the last 60 days. But in this day & age that should be the same rule for male/female/straight/gay/etc.
Most people will follow the stated guidelines. They are volunteers. It’s not as if anyone needs to give blood to put food on the table.
(In fact, they used to pay for blood, and stopped after a study found that donated blood had a much lower risk of transmitting hepatitis. It’s been illegal to pay for blood that will be used for transfusions for about a century now. Just to increase the odds that donors follow the guidelines.)
The HIV test is now very accurate. (It wasn’t, back in the day, with both false positives and false negatives.) I agree with twig that “have you had a new sex partner in the last 2 months” would be a much better screening question than “are you a man who has had sex with a man in the last xxxxx”.
Because most gays right now are on PreP. So the chance that they have HIV is essentially 0. The current rule says if you’re on PreP, you need to stop the medication for 30 days, not have gay sex for 3-12 months, before you can donate. And gay people are pretty fed up with not being able to donate blood for a long time.
There are other reasons to want to donate when you’re not able to - when you’re red blood cell count is too high. This can happen if you’re on steroids, which a lot of gay people are. One of the easiest thing to do to alleviate this is to donate blood regularly. This is why a lot of bodybuilders also donate blood.
They are supposed to throw the blood away if your red count is too high. People with a medical need to have blood drawn are advised to have it drawn and discarded, and not attempt to donate it. At least, that used to be the guideline, I’m a couple decades behind on this one.
That does create a bad incentive, of course, since you probably have a co-payment or something if you are having blood drawn for your health.
Yup. Insurance won’t cover the procedure if your high blood count is self-induced (through testosterone replacement therapy or other means).
And donating blood is free, whether they throw it out in the end or not.
There’s a blood draw where they only take your red blood cells, and filter out the plasma and platelets and give it back to you. They take double your blood for that since they’re only taking your blood cells.
If they replaced this with “please don’t donate if you’ve had sex with a new partner in the last 60 days”, (with no distinctions as to the sex of the partner) quite a lot of gays would become immediately eligible, and many more would stop feeling that they are being unfairly discriminated against.
Hmm, may vary by state. It’s been illegal in MA, where i grew up and where my father practiced medicine, for more than a century. And it was because of hepatitis, that being the largest and most obvious risk from donated blood at the time. And, obviously, there was no risk of HIV from domestic blood when that law was put into place.
Also, your addition of “HIV” to the statement about “a study” is just wrong. No studies needed to be done to show there was a risk of contracting HIV from donated blood. It was unfortunately all too obvious.
You can get paid to donate plasma. Not sure about other blood products. I’ve occasionally received gift cards for donating and sometimes they have prize drawings, but unsure if it’s from companies who donated them to the blood bank or the blood bank purchased them.
Do you know if this because they’re worried about getting a false negative or is there an issue with the medication itself? There’s a bunch of medications on the deferral list and I know at least some are because of potential harm if someone pregnant receives it.
The success rate of PreP is not 100% because people forget to take it for a day or two, and have risky sex, and then become HIV positive. And I think maybe they’re afraid that taking PreP will mess up their ability to test for HIV accurately?
Who knows. The whole blood donation eligibility has been on a “any risk is too much risk” train for a very very long time, especially when it comes to gay ppl
I certainly know a big issue with AIDS in the early days was that a lot of IV drug users were donating to get paid to have money to get high. And they used to combine blood from multiple people. Which is how the entire blood supply got tainted and virtually everyone who got a blood transfusion in a certain time period contracted HIV and, since treatment options were poor at the time, virtually all died of AIDS.
You can get paid to donate plasma in MA, according to this source, but I couldn’t find anything either way on whole blood. Most places won’t pay you (in any state) because it’s been considered bad practice since the AIDS debacle, but I couldn’t find anything confirming or disputing that it’s actually illegal.
I learned that it was bad practice to pay for blood in the seventies, before HIV was a known issue. I worked in a hematology research lab, and we WERE allowed to pay donors, because the blood was only being used for research, not to inject into people.
And there was a period when we got a lot of junkies donating blood, which was a security concern, because one of the buffers we used (and had huge jars of, lying out in the open) was a restricted substance with street value. We also had syringes all over the place.
(Added, after reading twig’s link about paid plasma donations in MA) There are a lot of biotech companies in MA. I suspect the people who pay for plasma are using it for research or to manufacture stuff, not to directly inject it into people. So that would always have been legal, just like my blood lab could pay donors.
Maybe. Or maybe it’s a risk for some recipients. There are a lot of drugs that will get you rejected, and most aren’t linked to any infectious condition. My husband is on a slightly less effective treatment for a condition he has because the more effective treatment would prevent him from giving platelets.