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'Gay' men OK'd to donate blood?

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Author Topic: 'Gay' men OK'd to donate blood?  (Read 745 times)
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« on: May 18, 2012, 07:35:33 pm »

(WASHINGTON TIMES) — The federal government has one study in a planning stage and three studies under way that could eventually provide evidence to end the ban on blood donations from all gay men, a federal official said Wednesday.

The key question is, “Can blood safety be maintained or improved under a revised blood-donation screening criteria that would permit donations by lower-risk MSM [men who have sex with men] donors?” Health and Human Services official James Berger told a meeting of the Blood Products Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration.

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/may/16/study-could-end-ban-on-gay-men-donating-blood/
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« Reply #1 on: August 02, 2013, 03:11:43 pm »

Warren demands feds lift ban on blood donations from gay men

Senator Elizabeth Warren is asking the federal government to speed its review of the current ban on gay men donating blood.
 
Warren’s office said she and a core group of four other lawmakers co-wrote a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday, signed by more than 80 colleagues, after a constituent from Roslindale complained to her that his blood had been rejected for donation after the Marathon bombings. Senator Edward Markey and Representatives Jim McGovern, John Tierney and Niki Tsongas of Massachusetts all signed on as well.
 
“For me, this has been a basic issue of fairness and of science. Blood donation policies should be grounded in science, not ugly and inaccurate stereotypes,” Warren said in a statement.
 
The letter to HHS cites a recent resolution from the American Medical Association asking that the ban be lifted “in favor of a policy based on individual risk factors other than sexual orientation.”
 
The letter says that science around HIV/AIDS has changed since the epidemic began more than three decades ago.

The letter “express[es] concern” with the pace of HHS’s review of the current policy and requests documents, criteria, and plans for finishing the review.
 
The American Association of Blood Banks, the Red Cross, and American’s Blood Centers have been in favor of a policy change since 2006, according to Warren’s office.
 
A request for comment from HHS was not immediately provided.

http://www.boston.com/politicalintelligence/2013/08/02/warren-demands-feds-lift-ban-blood-donations-from-gay-men/phXMIkIJIC1vI9QU4vBQlN/story.html
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« Reply #2 on: December 06, 2013, 06:28:39 am »

Federal government considering letting gay men donate blood

The federal government is considering changing its lifetime ban regarding blood donations from sexually active homosexuals.
 
The news comes less than a week after the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports that in 48 states men who have sex with men (MSM) represent the majority of HIV/AIDS sufferers.
 
Today members of the HHS Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability will be hearing seven presentations on the issue. The committee declined to change the policy in 2010.
 
Existing policy bars men who have had sex at least once since 1977 from donating blood for life, due to the high risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS. Other countries, such as Spain and Italy, have lifted their bans. Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Britain have a one-year deferral after sex. Canada has a five-year deferral policy.
 
The nation's major blood bank organizations – the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB), American Red Cross, and America's Blood Centers – have publicly supported changing the policy to a one-year deferral after men have sex with other men.
 
Dr. Steven Kleinman, senior medical adviser at AABB, told LifeSiteNews.com that his organization supports changing current policy to a one-year deferral, because “current testing catches the vast majority of HIV/AIDS-infected blood.”
 
Kleinman told LifeSiteNews.com that “current testing is highly accurate and has reduced the risk of HIV/AIDS to less than one in a million units that are given to patients.”
 
“The only cases where testing doesn't catch the infection is when a donor is in the very earliest stages of HIV infection, when the amount of virus is so small the testing cannot detect it,” he said.
 
Male homosexual sex is still the most common way for people to get HIV/AIDS. An August 2013 graphic from the CDC highlights that men having homosexual sex account for 52 percent of all Americans with AIDS and 63 percent of new infections..
 
The CDC report noted that there was a 12 percent increase in MSM with HIV/AIDS between 2008 and 2010, especially among young men. Anal sex without condoms among gay men rose 20 percent between 2005 and 2011.
 
Americans for Truth About Homosexuality President Peter LaBarbera told LifeSiteNews.com that lifting the ban “is public policy madness.”
 
“Rather than deal with the elephant in the room – actual homosexual conduct itself, which should be discouraged as a health hazard – politicians and bureaucratic elites, pressured by LGBT activists, are considering lifting the ban on homosexual blood donations,” he said.
 
LaBarbera also said homosexual activists put their desire to suppress all opposition to homosexuality, “in this case, giving blood, above the best interests of society and youth.”
 
He pointed to CDC data showing approximately 94 percent of males aged 13-24 with HIV/AIDS got it by having sex with other men.
 
“Government properly discourages smoking,” LaBarbera told LifeSiteNews. “Government should also take actions to discourage homosexual behavior...to protect the public and homosexual men themselves.”
 
But homosexual activists say not only should the government change its rules, but that a one-year deferral is not enough.
 
Gay public relations expert Bob Witeck – who is openly homosexual and the CEO of Witeck Communications – said the ban should be lifted entirely. In e-mails to LifeSiteNews.com, Witeck said the ban is “outdated and must surely go. The FDA uses multiple layers of safeguards to ensure blood safety by screening all blood donors based on risk factors and signs of infection.”
 
“Many gay men, like me, have been donors in the past, and would like to support our communities, neighbors, families, and friends with life-sustaining blood supplies,” Witeck told LifeSiteNews.
 
The testing of blood for HIV/AIDS has been a key factor in the argument for lifting the ban. Nucleic Acid Testing (NAT) is used in testing for all blood donations, and according to NBC News is used in combination with antibody tests to find eight different diseases: HIV, HTLV, hepatitis B and C, West Nile virus, Chagas disease, and syphilis, and in some cases cytomegalovirus (CMV).
 
When the ban was implemented, NAT testing did not exist, and HIV-infected blood infected many hemophiliacs. One of them was Ryan White, who was infected at the age of 13 and died one month before he graduated high school. White became a national figure because of his fight to attend school while ill.
 
Activists for lifting the FDA's ban have used White and other famous figures who have had HIV/AIDS for reasons unrelated to homosexual relations – such as former tennis star and hemophiliac Arthur Ashe and former basketball star and philanderer Magic Johnson – as evidence that the HIV/AIDS affects communities outside of gay men.
 
According to Witeck, “NAT testing has changed everything since the 1970s and 1980s.”
 
Kleinman said a one-year ban “would mean the number of gay men giving blood would not rise significantly,” because most gay men having sex are doing so within the one-year window, “though some college students protesting the current policy may give blood more often.”
 
Men having sex with men are not the only subset of Americans who are not allowed to give blood for life. Intravenous drug users, leukemia or lymphoma sufferers, and people born in England during certain years are barred for life from giving blood by the Red Cross. The ban on British blood is because medical science does not allow for testing of the human version of Mad Cow Disease. MSM differs from this case slightly, because testing does catch HIV/AIDS. Another difference is being born in England is not chosen, whereas engaging in sexual relations is a distinct choice in all cases except for ****.
 
Peter Sprigg, a senior fellow at the Family Research Council, testified at today's hearings that the safety of the blood supply should trump homosexuals' feelings of ostracism.
 
"No reasonable concept of social justice requires expanding the pool of potential blood donors,” he said.
 
“On the contrary, social justice requires that only the needs of potential blood recipients be considered at all; and it requires that national policy ensure the maximum level of safety that is consistent with maintaining an adequate blood supply,” he concluded.

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/federal-government-considering-letting-gay-men-donate-blood?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=30bc9d8f3f-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines_06_19_2013&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0caba610ac-30bc9d8f3f-390793862
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« Reply #3 on: December 20, 2014, 08:45:21 am »

Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren: Let gay men donate blood

Let her get some first



U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, has joined with dozens of her Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate to demand that the United States drop its lifetime ban on blood donation by men who have had sex with other men.

In a letter to HHS, Warren – a favorite among progressives for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, although the senator insists she won’t be running – wrote: “Our current blood donation policy prevents many healthy gay and bisexual men from donating blood for their entire lives.”

Calling the ban “discriminatory” and “unacceptable,” she went on to state that homosexual and bisexual men “should not be categorically excluded because of outdated stereotypes.”

The longstanding ban on blood donations by homosexual men was established in 1983 in response to the epidemic of AIDS sweeping through the gay community.  The ban applies to any man who has had homosexual intercourse since 1977, when the virus, which has its origins in Africa, first began to claim lives in the West.  It is a lifetime ban, meaning that any man who has ever had relations with another man is forbidden to give blood, no matter how long it has been since his last homosexual experience.

In November, an HHS panel recommended ending the lifetime ban, proposing to replace it with a policy that would bar any man from donating blood for a full year after his last homosexual experience, and require rigorous testing of such men for HIV/AIDS and other bloodborne diseases.

But Warren and her Democratic colleagues say that this proposed rule would also be discriminatory.

“A one-year deferral policy, like a lifetime ban, is a categorical exclusion based solely on the sex of an individual’s sexual partner,” Warren wrote.  As for the testing requirement, Warren agreed that a rigorous system of testing is prudent, but objected to singling homosexual behavior out as the justification for the tests.

“[W]e are troubled that such a system has suddenly become a prerequisite to change the blood donation policy for MSM [men who have sex with men],” Warren wrote.  “This system has never before been deemed necessary for any other group of individuals to donate, including [other high-risk donors] currently subject to a one-year deferral policy.”

Warren and her colleagues urged HHS to issue new recommendations lifting the restrictions on homosexual donations by the end of the month.

Regardless of how HHS responds to Warren’s demands, it is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that must ultimately approve any change to the policies governing blood donation, and that agency has expressed grave reservations about loosening the safety rules.

At a meeting earlier this month to discuss the HHS recommendations, FDA experts rejected arguments by homosexual activists urging them to drop the lifetime ban.

"If I look at the science I would be very wary of a one-year deferral," said Dr. Susan Leitman, a member of the FDA panel that weighed the proposed changes. "It sounds to me like we're talking about policy and civil rights rather than our primary duty, which is transfusion safety."

Fellow panelist and HIV/AIDS activist Corey Dubin also recommended erring on the side of safety. “No matter how you stack it, there is a risk increase,” Dubin said of the proposed change.  Ultimately, the panel tabled discussion of the rule change, saying more research is necessary before they would feel comfortable relaxing the current safety standards.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), homosexual men make up only 2 percent of the population, but 61 percent of all new AIDS cases in the United States.  Up to 20 percent of gay and bisexual men are infected with HIV/AIDS, but nearly half of them are unaware of it, says the CDC.

Current blood donation rules don’t just ban men who have sex with men from donating blood.  Other groups subject to lifetime bans include anyone who has ever used intravenous drugs (regardless of last date of usage), people who have received human pituitary-derived growth hormones, and anyone who has spent more than three months in a country where Variant Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease (Mad Cow Disease) is prevalent. 

Warren and her colleagues are not arguing in favor of relaxing the rules for these groups.


https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/democrat-sen.-elizabeth-warren-let-gay-men-donate-blood
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« Reply #4 on: December 20, 2014, 08:11:13 pm »

If the % gets into double digits - it could very well wipe out the entire country, albeit worse than a nuke.
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« Reply #5 on: December 23, 2014, 01:22:35 pm »

FDA Plans to Ease Ban on Blood Donations by Gay and Bisexual Men

The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it plans to allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood, but only if they have abstained from gay sex for a year.

The decision would end a lifetime ban that was put in place in 1983, during the early days of the AIDS crisis. Medical groups have said that advances in HIV testing make such a ban unnecessary, and gay rights organizations have said it perpetuates stereotypes.

The new policy would put the United States in line with Britain, Australia and Japan. The FDA said it had "carefully examined and considered the available scientific evidence," including several recently completed studies.

One gay rights organization, Gay Men's Health Crisis, immediately denounced the new policy as "offensive and harmful."

"By implementing this policy, the FDA will continue to fan the flames of the outdated stereotype that HIV is only a 'gay disease,'" the organization said. It pointed out that the policy does not require a year of celibacy from straight donors.

The FDA's questionnaire for blood donors asks men whether they have had sex with a man since 1977. In November, a panel of blood safety experts convened by the Department of Health and Human Services voted overwhelmingly in favor of doing away with the lifetime ban and moving to a one-year celibacy rule.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-plans-ease-ban-blood-donations-gay-bisexual-men-n273886
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« Reply #6 on: December 26, 2014, 07:12:09 pm »

Does the FDA really think they're going to get any honest answers from these sodomites? I doubt it.
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« Reply #7 on: November 24, 2015, 12:12:27 am »

Twitter bans blood drives in offices worldwide until gays can donate

Social network giant Twitter has banned onsite blood drives in its offices worldwide where regulations do not permit blood donations from gay or bisexual men, a move that LGBT-rights advocates say is a first for a public technology company.

The San Francisco-based company made the decision after one of its U.S. employees, a gay man, was turned away from donating blood at the company's headquarters, a spokeswoman said on Monday.

Blood donations from gay men have been barred since the discovery that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, could be transmitted through transfusions.

Currently in the United States, under a policy by the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that is more than three decades old, men who have sex with other men cannot donate blood.

That rule is being reevaluated, with the agency recommending in draft guidance in May that gay men be allowed to donate blood a year after their last sexual contact.

Twitter employee Jim Halloran, who heads TwitterOpen, the company's employee resource group for workers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, criticized the potential partial lifting of the ban as insufficient.

"This is again just a lesser form of discrimination based on a person's identity," Halloran said.

Twitter has urged the FDA to lift its restrictions on blood donations from gay men and instead to base its regulations on sexual behavior, not orientation, according to a letter the company sent to the federal agency in July.

The FDA declined to comment.

Twitter has some 2,300 employees at its headquarters and nearly twice as many globally, in countries from China to Ireland.

So far, its onsite blood drives have primarily been held at its headquarters in San Francisco, the spokeswoman said. A blood drive was held at its New York offices last year, she said.

At the LGBT rights advocacy group Human Rights Campaign's office in Washington, D.C., Government Affairs Director David Stacy hailed Twitter's stance.

"With the current ample supply of blood in the United States, it makes sense for an organization like Twitter to help raise awareness of how the current policy is needlessly discriminatory and based on stereotypes rather than risky behavior," he said.

Separately, a spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign said Twitter's move was believed to be a first for a public tech company.

Earlier this month, France announced that next year it will lift a lifetime ban on gay men donating blood, which had been in place since 1983.

In April, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that banning homosexual men from giving blood may be justified where strictly necessary and only if there are no alternatives for preventing the transmission of severe infectious diseases.

http://www.trust.org/item/20151124055426-lph7c/
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« Reply #8 on: December 26, 2015, 08:40:29 pm »

U.S. to Allow Homosexual Men to Donate Blood if Abstinent for at Least One Year

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued its final guidance on allowing homosexual men to donate blood, stating that men should be allowed to do so if they have been abstinent for at least one year.

As previously reported, the FDA first announced its intent to loosen its restrictions on blood donations from homosexual men last year, stating that it would “take the necessary steps to recommend a change to the blood donor deferral period for men who have sex with men from indefinite deferral to one year since the last sexual contact.”

The administration said that it compared its policies with current scientific evidence surrounding HIV transmission, as well policy changes implemented by other countries, before making its final guidance announcement on Monday.

“In reviewing our policies to help reduce the risk of HIV transmission through blood products, we rigorously examined several alternative options, including individual risk assessment,” explained Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, in a statement.

“Ultimately, the 12-month deferral window is supported by the best available scientific evidence, at this point in time, relevant to the U.S. population,” he continued. “We will continue to actively conduct research in this area and further revise our policies as new data emerge.”

The FDA noted that the UK and Australia both have a one-year deferral period.

The administration first enacted its policy in 1983 during the height of the AIDS crisis, but some have decried the ban as being discriminatory toward homosexuals. The National Gay Blood Drive released a statement on its website this week that while it is “pleased to see the FDA has issued the final guidance” on homosexual blood donation, it still finds the rules tantamount to discrimination.

“While gay and bisexual men will be eligible to donate their blood and help save lives under this 12 month deferral, countless more will continue to be banned solely on the basis of their sexual orientation and without medical or scientific reasoning,” it wrote.

The group wants homosexuality removed as a stigma surrounding blood donation.

“So today we begin the final push to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation from the blood donation process altogether. We strongly encourage the FDA to move toward a deferral based upon individual risk assessment,” it said.

But others state that they are concerned that the FDA has loosened its restrictions at all.

“There are several highly disturbing aspects to this politically-motivated change in the United States’ blood donation policy,” Peter LaBarbera, president Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, told reporters. “First of all, homosexual activists frame this entire issue in terms of so-called ‘anti-gay discrimination’ and equality, instead of prioritizing above all the safety of the American blood supply.”

“Secondly,” the FDA’s report shows that a small percentage of homosexual men have ignored the blood donation ban,” he continued. “Now we are going to trust practicing homosexuals with an even looser regulation?”

“Thirdly, the FDA report shows that the new standards are more lax than Australia’s policy—which threatens violators with prosecution if they are found to have lied about their behavior in making their blood donation—even though Australia was cited as the model for the U.S. making the change,” LaBarbera said.

Heterosexuals who are involved in prostitution, those who have had sex with a prostitute, or those involved in illicit drug activity are also included in the ban.

http://christiannews.net/2015/12/26/u-s-to-allow-homosexual-men-to-donate-blood-if-abstinent-for-at-least-one-year/
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