Undoubtedly. You can take PreP while pregnant, although there are doubtless other cases where you can’t.
But at a minimum it seems safe to say that they’re worried about false negatives.
Yeah, it’s been required to label blood as paid or volunteer since 1978, which is before HIV was known.
Yet it was common practice to pay for it into the 80s. That’s how the hemophiliacs caught it. To be fair, I think that was mostly from plasma donations, not whole blood.
And it was in part because the companies that made factor 8 didn’t cook the plasma after they knew that they ought to. I reserved the liability claim for one of those companies (to policy limits). I am still angry about that – I think the management should have been criminally tried for negligent homicide, I don’t think they should have gotten off scott free for deciding not to toss the stuff that had already been made and was known (by them, not by their customers) to be almost certainly infected with HIV.
Yeah, very few hemophiliacs need whole blood, but they often need clotting factor, which is a blood product.
Actually, thinking about it, I’m surprised they paid for the plasma. My employer had excluded “products” when insuring this pharmaceutical company, and the courts ruled that our policy covered the liability because human blood isn’t sold, and what was actually sold was the “service” of making the blood product and transmitting it to the medical system. So “blood products” were covered under “premises and operations” and not under “products liability”.
Also, buying blood to be transfused into people was definitely illegal in MA in 1978. That’s a little after my blood lab job, and the law wasn’t new at the time. Interesting that it took so long for the rest of the country to get on board.
Since this is a Canada-US thread I would just add it is illegal to sell blood in Canada but it has recently become legal to sell plasma. It is a controversial issue and few provinces permit it.
Given that studies have shown voluntary blood donation to be preferable to payment or patient-arranged transfusion, and given that voluntary blood donation relies on donor altruism, what if anything is the proper role of shaming people who are likely candidates for donation but choose not to donate?
Veering off thread topic but I don’t think the average person thinks that much about blood donation. My primary motivation to regularly donate blood is that it often goes to people undergoing cancer treatment. Cancer treatment or a catastrophic medical emergency is stressful enough, no one should have to worry about blood being unavailable.
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You catch more flies with honey. Encourage donation and make it easy on them. I bet the pandemic has hurt donations because workplace donations were certainly a thing in the before times. I’m not sure how to replace that. Neighborhood blood drives?
Some churches do blood drives. Maybe that can be expanded. But people don’t spend as much time in church as they do at work, so it might be harder to get the volume that way.
You catch the most flies with poop…
Actually, I think you actually would catch more flies with vinegar than with honey.
Canada’s Supreme Court has ruled that extreme intoxication can be a defence to violent crime. Would be interested to hear from someone as to what the US stance on this is.
Conducting an attack with impunity requires careful planning. You need to case your victim to be sure to catch her alone. Bring alcohol or other substances in unlabeled containers, then as soon as your victim is unconscious, quaff those substances and dispose of the containers discretely. Be sure to choose substances for which the timing of the onset of intoxication is difficult to establish.
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IANAL, but I imagine it depends on a lot of other circumstances. Like melanin, for example…
I think it’s counter productive to shame people. You have no idea why they chose not to donate. Maybe they know they are at risk for some blood-borne illness and don’t want you to know. Testing isn’t perfect. So shaming people just increases the odds the blood supply is contaminated.
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That’s…weird
It sounded odd to me, but it’s more iirc that the current law preventing extreme intoxication as a defense is written too generally. The court offered a suggestion on how the law could be rewritten to be ok and not interfere with charter rights.
On a more practical level, I think the answer is “it depends”, with one variable being the attorneys’ skill at swaying the jury one way or another.
I agree with this. It has been a while, since I have donated most recently with a local blood bank rather than the ARC, but I seem to remember they gave you a code to say “dump that blood” you could send in after donating if you knew it shouldn’t be used but were pressured to donate
Yup. They’ve started asking “do you know of any reason why your donated blood should NOT be used” now.
Because people feel pressured to sign up for blood drives even when they know they are HIV+ or have an active herpes outbreak or some other situation where they shouldn’t donate blood.
Which is a monumental waste of resources, but still preferable to letting the contaminated blood get into the blood supply.
Apparently in a few cases they were seeing the same HIV+ people donate repeatedly. They’d informed the donors of their HIV status, but the donors kept donating and finally they asked why. The donors didn’t want to admit to their co-workers why they couldn’t donate so they saved face by donating and relying on the screen to keep their blood from infecting others.
So apparently shaming is pretty popular despite the opinions of people ITT, though I realize there’s a gray area between deliberate shaming and inadvertent peer pressure.
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God damnit I need a local Canadian to update my passport. CALLING ALL CANADIANS