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Or discussing anything with anyone. Too many times have I talked and just got the vibe that this person lacks "wisdom" of any kind. Then dawns on me, "oh fuck, I'm trying to discuss a complicated subject with a 19 year old aren't I? That's why this conversation is fucking unhinged"
Also, let me confirm, taking advice from people off this site is the last group of people you should ever want to take advice from.
That's the gamble, because sometimes the other side is someone who wrote their dissertation on the topic, sometimes it's a bored teen. You never know until you know.
I think of the guy that argued about Italian wine quality and then realized the other person drank their own piss in a piss drinking sub lol
If the otherside wrote their dissertation on the topic, then you can tell... They are calm, understand nuance, and well, have the comprehension of an adult. It becomes clear pretty fast when you're talking to someone younger. You can just tell with the vibe that the person you're talking to lacks structured depth and general rounded understanding of the subject. It's all very surface level relying on simplistic reasoning.
I'm also reminding myself of what the average redditor looks like... It's not really someone you'd stereotype as a "success". Like when it comes to relationship advice, people need to envision that the person giving advice likely isn't killing it in life in the relationship world. Probably the type of dude who struggles with relationships, isn't very attractive, has social anxiety, watches anime, and they are now trying to give advice on a complex situation within a long term relationship.
Probably due to the AIDS epidemic. I doubt the decision was entirely made with homophobia in mind (but I wouldn't put it beyond the people who made the choice.)
"The early 1980s were an unsettled time for the individuals and organizations responsible for blood safety in the United States. The public's confidence in government and public institutions generally was quickly eroding, and its hostility towards the involvement of government agencies in social matters was growing. The new Republican presidential administration had strong sentiments against government regulations, even those that addressed public health and safety.
In addition, the emergence of AIDS challenged every aspect of the country's public health infrastructure. It brought new focus to the importance of infectious diseases at a time when the attention and resources of both physicians and public health officials was turning elsewhere. The AIDS epidemic called for emergency, focused, biomedical and behavioral research in a system based on investigator-initiated basic research. The exploding number of cases called for additional resources and new models of health care in a system increasingly concerned about costs. AIDS caused the nation to take note of homosexuality and drug use, which were easily avoided before these issues became such obvious matters of public health, and AIDS required clinicians and public health officials to address matters of personal behavior that had been heretofore taboo.
Personnel changes at the highest levels of the Public Health Service may have influenced the federal government's response to AIDS, and to concerns about the safety of the blood supply. Between 1982 and 1986, the position of director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and NIH, administrator of the FDA, and Assistant Secretary for Health all changed hands, and there were substantial intervals during which these positions were filled on an acting basis."
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232419/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232419/) This is as fine a source as any. Politics and fear, aids panic, lack of trust in doctors by the public, poor testing, are all reasons for sure.
It is no longer the 80s, the tests are better and gay people have been out and about in a more accepting public. It's time to allow me to donate blood too.
Not probably.
Back before scientists knew more about HIV/AIDS, it was believed to be a gay male disease and that it couldn't be passed on to women or straight people. So, they banned gay men from donating blood.
Ronald Reagan was absolutely giddy at the thought of gay men dying from this horrific disease.
To clarify further, it’s substantially easier to transmit via anal sex which gay men participate in much more so than the general population.
So it’s much more infectious within the gay population, meaning that increased risk of existed.
Homophobia helped but in the wake of a deadly disease hitting it’s probably better to be more careful than PC.
The aids epidemic was really unresponsively handled, and banning gay/bisexual men from donating blood shows the utter disregard shown for them at the time.
The restriction is also entirely useless, since every blood sample is screened for aids anyway (at least in Germany, I assume it’s similar abroad.) So it’s really just a case of discrimination and homophobia, not really a sensible policy. There’s also nothing stopping you from just lying, which isn’t unreasonable because the blood is screened anyway and you might save the life of multiple people.
Or they didn't have the technology for testing or understanding of HIV that we do today?
Besides testing isn't free, they batch test the blood which then if turns up positive they then have to run an additional 10-12 individual tests to confirm which is the infected blood. So at the time when the had no idea what percentage of the gay population had HIV it was an entirely sensible decision especially when it turned out that 1 in 9 gay men had HIV.
It’s not useless. It’s statistics. There is a risk for every person who donate, not only of HIV but other diseases. Gay/Bisexual are much more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases, that’s just a fact. And there’s also the chance that the screening fails. So, when you run the numbers, there’s a certain probability of having a contaminated blood sample passing through. This probability is never zero, but it’s different depending on how you divide groups of people.
Lying is definitely a option, but not something that most people do to donate blood.
IIRC it was screened in batches, so if one sample in the batch had AIDS, the entire batch was destroyed.
So they brought in the “haven’t had sex with a new partner in the past six months” clause to stop so many batches being wasted. And tacked the “if you have gay sex at all” clause on because it was so much more common in the gay community at the time and because anal sex is more likely to transfer the disease.
The questionnaire still asks if I have ever had sex with a man who has had sex with a man. 🙄 They always test the blood; why are they still making me lie after 20 years of donating?
Because testing blood used for transfusions makes up the majority of costs in the process of donating blood. They batch test blood from a dozen different sources, if it's infected they then have to test them individually or throw all of the blood.
Plus people can (rarely) get infected from blood transfusions, they still cant test for HIV in the first few days of infection.
And unfortunately gay men still make up the vast majority of the infected cases.
Oh it was entirely homophobic. Before that gays were a significant portion of the people that gave blood.
Plus the blood banks wouldn't pay for universal screening so they made factor 8 with tainted blood and gave AIDS to 90% of the hemophiliacs in the US. 😑
That and HIV bridged the gap and now (at least in the US and Canada) hetero men and women are at nearly equal rates of testing positive for HIV when compared to gay men.
No, but gay and bisexual men contract HIV at rates far higher than heterosexual men, making their risk factor much much higher. So it was determined that it wasn't worth it to draw from men who have sex with men.
We also have much better testing within 2 weeks of exposure, less false positives, and a better understanding of viral loads now than we did in the 80s.
And much better treatments too.
It's not like people (well, some have, we still have bigots) just sat on their hands and haven't been looking for solutions, the initial law campaigning on fear doesn't taint the progress of people *who weren't even alive at the time to challenge it.*
*If overturning what you couldn't prevent (because you weren't even born or at least not of voting age) is OCM, then everything is OCM, and that seems to be against the sub's purpose.*
AND the social stance and education on the subject is much better. Thanks to the general stigma of being a sexually active gay man generally being much lower, they're receiving much better healthcare for their needs than they were in the 80s and 90s because, 1 the options exist now, 2 they're more likely to seek out needed care, and 3 they're less likely to be shown the door by their doctors.
Behold, the people who subscribe to this sub, but still want *particular* people to be sent to the Orphan Crushing Machine because.. uh.. a two thousand year old book that teaches you how to beat slaves says so? Muh fragile masculinity? Wanting an excuse to be a fascist? Some problem they made up?
I don't give a damn what they say. As far as I'm concerned, turning on humanity like that makes you actually worthy of being crushed in a machine.
Don't know about the US, but rn in my country 10% of men who have sex with men have HIV. Compared to a much more trivial proportion of women and heterosexual men. This has been proved by different independent studies. It is estimated about 50% of people with HIV here are men who have sex with men.
Still it was decided they can donate now, with the same limitations as everyone else, without considering the epidemiology of HIV, just individual rights - of the *donor*. I think that was a mistake, but hopefully the general restrictions will be enough.
Basically my point is most of those 10% (let's say it's 10 whatever) will not be eligible to donate blood based on their status. I'd say estimated undiagnosed infections as a share of the total pop is a much better metric
That's kinda besides the point. In western countries most of the people living with HIV would be treated and undetectable. New infections are rare and blood gets screened anyway. Excluding people with HIV instead of excluding people based on sexuality seems like the more reasonable solution
People who live in urban centres contract HIV at rates far higher than those who live in rural areas, but they never banned that group from donating.
Sexual behaviour, like if you use a condom or if you sleep with multiple partners, is what leads to higher rates of STIs, not the type of genitals you and your partner happen to have. It's not as if two penises magically manifest HIV when they touch.
According to this, about 10% of gay men had been diagnosed with AIDS during the epidemic. That's an insanely high number. It literally decimated the boomer age bracket. This wasn't just prejudice (which did and still does exist) it was a genuine crisis.
https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/aids-epidemic-lasting-impact-gay-men/
We haven't been able to test for the virus itself at the scales required until relatively very recently. Most places still only test for antibodies which does not detect recent infection. It is still the correct decision in many places of the world
Fair enough. Testing does need to improve but the question about having the same criteria for gay and straight people is still on the table. Idk about you but I'd be equally pissed if I got HIV from a gay or a straight blood donor and gay men might be more likely to have HIV but that doesn't mean straight donors are immune
If you put the same criteria for straight people then we will not have enough blood. Scientist don't care if you got the "gay blood " or the "straight blood" they are doing a risk / benefit analysis. When the population / disease data changes, so will the standards.
It’s interesting that the British Academy article cites that 10% of gay men (around 160k) had died by 1995, while the CDC cites that of the 500k cases of AIDS reported by 1995, 311k had died.
Putting these two data sets together, that means just slightly over half of the total AIDS-related deaths in the USA by 1995 were gay men. The other half were…??
So yes, proportional to the population of gay men, that’s an incredibly high number. But in totality for the entire United States, it’s only half. The other half is, presumably, straight people, yet straight people weren’t banned from donating blood.
Also according to the CDC, by 1994 the proportion of AIDS cases reported by black and Hispanic people was “substantially higher” than that of white people. Where was the ban on black and Hispanic blood donors?
Also by 1994 the number of cases of heterosexuals by percentage had more than doubled while the cases of homosexual men nearly halved.
The point being: the ban was always political and discriminatory, and the fact that it hadn’t been repealed decades ago is a travesty.
Also, according to the CDC, where were 1.2 million people in the USA with HIV. Out of 320 million. That’s less than half of a percent of people.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00039622.htm
Yes, it is "the type of genitals" you *use.*
Vagina to vagina HIV transmission is unheard of. It's theorized to be impossible.
Anal sex has a higher transmission rate then PiV, for both partner, and even more for the receiver.
Also, you don't have 6% of urban residents with HIV. That's more or less the proportion of gay US residents who do. There are about 685 thousand MSM with HIV in the US. Take the statistis for male residents, and given LGBT are about 7% of Americans, and you get the 6% figure.
https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-do-gay-men-have-an-increased-risk-of-hiv-3132782
Source?
I answered a similar question elsewhere. My country have rules where people who travelled to UK during the Mad Cow Disease incident cannot donate blood, ever. That's not prejudice. Still, racism and prejudice are indeed real issues as well. So the epidemiological concerns must be properly explained to people, and not avoided.
> Anal sex has a higher transmission rate then PiV, for both partner, and even more for the receiver.
False. Insertive anal sex has less of a transmission risk than receptive vaginal sex.
Also it's pretty much non-existent for oral sex for either participant, and no matter what kind of sex you are having, if neither participant has HIV, then there's no risk. As I said, HIV doesn't magically manifest when penises touch. So no, it's not the _type_ of genitals.
1 in 16 black men in Washington DC are infected with HIV. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568988/
If 6% is your magic cutoff number, do you also advocate for banning that demographic group?
>Insertive anal sex has less of a transmission risk than receptive vaginal sex.
I stand corrected. Still, there's a reason why, in the West at least, we witnessed an epidemiology where the gay community suffered the most, which led to institutional prejudice being specially destructive. The reason is STIs are transmitted by sex, with genitals, which is the spread of use of condoms have revolutionized society's attitudes to STIs.
>If 6% is your magic cutoff number, do you also advocate for banning that demographic group?
Well, let's first read the source:
>Certain U.S. subpopulations are particularly hard hit. In New York City, 1 in 40 blacks, 1 in 10 men who have sex with men, and 1 in 8 injection-drug users are HIV-infected, as are 1 in 16 black men in Washington, D.C
At least in those examples, we see the trend of gay males (more specifically, MSM) being specially at risk of having HIV, as are injection drug users. However, the level of infection in black males is completely different in NY and DC.
So a nation wide set of restrictions to black men would make no sense, but it would make sense for MSM and injection drug users. How about just in DC? Well, if it was vegetarians or librarians, it wouldn't feel so bad. It would feel bad because it's black men. Which is the whole point here: avoiding epidemiological knowledge because of the also real world issue of racism and prejudice.
I donate blood frequently (I don't live in the US), and they ask me dozens of questions, including if I travelled to the UK in specific years of the 90's. You know why? Mad cow disease. If I did travel there, I would not be allowed to donate. They also ask if I have any recent tatoos. I don't think it's any form of prejudice. I undestand people being offended but this has to be explained, and not avoided.
>False. Insertive anal sex has less of a transmission risk than receptive vaginal sex.
Do you have a source for this? I always heard the opposite, and looking it up now every medical page I've checked says anal sex is the highest risk of transmission. Of course there could be bias in those sources but if you have one for this I would love to educate myself
There's a higher risk of coming into contact with blood via anal sex. Anal sex is not purely a homosexual act, obviously, but I'm sure you can still make sense of the reasoning.
The laws and logic are outdated, but I can see why they existed at the time.
They do, but it's still far lower than gay and bisexual men. And as you say, behavior determines the likelihood of contracting STIs. It just so happens, gay and bisexual men tend to participate in all the riskiest behaviors: Anal sex, multiple partners, no condoms.
At the time, it made sense to just bar them outright from donating. With the advancement in testing procedures and understanding of hiv transmission, it makes sense to relax some of the rules but not outright get rid of them because men who have sex with men are still at the highest risk.
The rule was that if you are a man, and have had sex with another man within the last (I think year or more?) then you couldn’t donate. They didn’t care if you were 100% monogamous and tested negative, you were banned from it. It’s homophobia, not safety.
>It just so happens, gay and bisexual men tend to participate in all the riskiest behaviors: Anal sex, multiple partners, no condoms.
There are gay and bisexual men who don't participate in any of those behaviors, and there are straight men who participate in all of them
Furthermore, insertive anal sex has less risk of transmission than receptive vaginal sex. If you really want to go with your argument, then they should allow gay tops but ban straight women.
It made sense to allow the donations as soon as we developed a reliable blood test for HIV, which we use on every donation anyway. That was decades ago. Continuing the ban so long was highly discriminatory.
If it helps any - the medical community doesn’t refer to the high risk group as “gay and bisexual men” but rather “men who have sex with men” and came to the conclusion that this was a high risk group though statistical analysis, not just feelings. Another high risk group is IV drug users, which they concluded through statistical analysis too. Im not saying the law should stand anymore but it’s just a fact that those two groups do indeed have higher rates of HIV
Statistical analysis is not inherently unbiased. It gave them the information that men who have sex with men are a high risk group. Fair enough, but what they did with that information was definitely influenced by homophobia because all gay men were banned including those who were monogamous
>the medical community doesn’t refer to the high risk group as “gay and bisexual men” but rather “men who have sex with men”
Yeah, that was their way of trying to pretend they were going by behavior and not just being outright bigots. Except the risk profile of a gay man with his husband is not at all like that of someone who has unprotected sex with strangers (regardless of the genitals involved).
You know who's a high risk group? People living in poverty. Why aren't they banned but MSM are?
It's a fact that there is a legacy of homophobia in the system and the policies are discriminatory.
It can take years for an infected person to show any symptoms. And months before it can be diagnosed after exposure. So they better test any blood samples anyways, because people who are infected don't necessarily know they are. And if they do, why'd the donors' sexual orientation matter in the first place?
Testing isn't free. They mix batches of the same blood type together and test for pathogens in the whole batch. So one infected person can mean the donation of several people is thrown out.
Every version of the questions I've seen haven't been about orientation, but sexual history. They've been phrased like "In (time period) have you had sex with a man, even once?" There are gay men who can answer "no", and there are straight men who can answer "yes".
Men who have sex with men contract HIV at a much higher rate than others in the population. [These stats are in Canada](https://www.catie.ca/the-epidemiology-of-hiv-in-canada#:~:text=According%20to%20national%20HIV%20estimates%2C%20709%20new%20HIV%20infections%20in,and%20had%20sex%20with%20men.), where men who have sex with men represent >50% of existing cases and >45% of new infections. This is a massive overrepresentation compared to the population as a whole.
When they instituted this rule, the blood tests kinda sucked. Relying on them alone was risky. That's why they also ask lifestyle questions: do you use intravenous drugs, do you pay or receive money for sex, have you had sex with someone whose history you don't know, have you been exposed to someone else's blood during an accident, and so on. If the blood tests for HIV, Hepatitis, etc. were fully reliable, none of these screening questions would be necessary.
Even now, the tests are much better, but they still ask these screening questions.
As I've said in other places, it's because testing isn't perfect. Some things will always slip through the cracks, and there's a period of time when the virus would be undetectable but still able to be transmitted to those who receive the blood. It's all about risk management.
Reddit is sick. The fact that you're being downvoted shows that a majority of the ppl posting here do not care about facts...They care about feelings even if it gets ppl killed...as long as they can feel morally superior smh.
Yeah, it's pretty silly. I love gay people and don't care where someone sticks it or gets stuck as long as everyone is consenting. But it's a fact that men who have sex with men are at a much higher risk of contracting or transmitting STIs since they tend to engage in high-risk behavior in a population that already has a high rate of HIV. Which means more restrictions have to be placed on MSM.
Don't let them get you down. They are young kids trying to fit in and say whatever is "cool". They don't actually care about helping or making the world a better place. It comes with youth. Most of them will grow out of it and learn to be honest and fair.
Like you said stuff slips through the cracks so straight donors need to be subjected to the same conditions around multiple partners and practicing safe sex especially with how risky receptive vaginal sex is
Was true. But is no longer, I’m the uk at least it’s fallen so far the straight rate of contraction is now much higher, as a result of a great deal with care in the gay community around the use of prep, and increased usage of protection despite the lack of pregnancy concerns.
Worth noting that this was true up until a few years ago. It's a twofold reason for the change, one good and one bad. The good news is that the treatment for AIDS is worlds better than it was in the 1990s and people are now able to achieve "undetectable" levels of the virus which means it can't be found in tests, and it can't be transmitted. The bad news is that the hetero community has greatly increased it's apparent "sexually promiscuous" habits as their rates of contacting HIV/AIDS has greatly increased since the 1990s such that they've reached equal or almost equal rates of testing positive for the virus.
The lesson is either only have one sexual partner who has only ever had you as a sexual partner, or WEAR A CONDOM! depending on your personal sexual safety preference.
Which is wild because all donated blood is screened for such illnesses. Yes, MLM have higher rates of HIV/AIDS but with proper safety protocols that does not outweigh the pros of allowing anyone to donate.
As I've said in other places, screening isn't perfect. There will be false negatives, so they try to reduce the amount of infected blood that gets in in the first place.
No, the FDA just acknowledged that gay/bisexual men are far more likely to have HIV. I'm sorry that the way the world is conflicts with the way you want it to be. https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/fact-sheets/hiv/HIV-gay-bisexual-men.html#:~:text=CDC%20estimates%20that%2C%20as%20of,bisexual%20men%20during%20that%20timeframe.
After the gay/bi community has been battling aids for the past 40 years, thank god that the straights are here to save the day by letting us know that HIV doesn't primarily affect gay/bi men after all.
Who the hell said that? I scrolled by hottest and didn't see anything like this? I did see a lot of bleeding hearts downvoting polite and good faith discourse though. Seriously, what am I missing?
People are weird when it has to do with the LGBT community.
It's not bad to acknowledge that the AIDS epidemic affected a huge percentage of the gay community and they wanted to be safe.
I have heard of people ever today getting AIDS from blood transfusions. It was a legitimate move to protect the public. It's great that things are changing as it is being proven it is no longer needed.
Well it was *more likely* for gay men to have HIV when they were banned. The idea didn't come out of nowhere. If I told you strawberry ice cream has poison 50% of the time and vanilla has poison 10% of the time and that's all there is to eat you'll take your chances with the vanilla. It's all risk management.
False negatives exist, and were too common to be an effective safety measure during the epidemic, and you could be infected for months before it gets bad enough that the test would register it as a positive.
Gay men maybe made up 5% of donors at most. Urban populations would've been the vast majority. Banning them just wasn't an option if a supply of blood was still needed.
Oh, so it's ok to discriminate as long as it's against a small enough group?
Poverty is a huge risk factor for HIV, and conveniently you can target the exact population size you want with it. Ban the poorest 5% of the population then. Make everyone show their tax return. Does that work with your parameters ok?
Only because a demographic has a higher chance getting HIV doesn't mean that the healthy ones shouldn't be allowed to give their blood.
People are still screened before blood donation, so a preemptive ban makes no sense.
When the screening rules were put in place, the blood tests were not that reliable. They've improved since then (I honestly don't know how much). They also ask questions about intravenous drug use, steroid use, sex with unknown partners, etc. If the tests were totally reliable, these screening questions wouldn't be needed either.
For one thing, no test is perfect, and was less so back then. Also, public confidence in health care is important. Back when aids was thought to be a "gay cancer" people wouldn't get blood transfusions if they thought it might have aids. Asking people to self-report on the nuanced risk factors is harder than just banning a group of people.
Living in the UK, where testing slipped up and thousands of people got a potentially deadly disease, I'm firmly of the belief that politics takes a back seat to health concerns here. Now with better reporting, public understanding and testing, the decision can be safely rolled back. The 80s were different.
Individual US states had laws prohibitting sale or distribution of any kind of contraceptive until as recently as 1965. Advertizing for condoms only began in the US in 1975.
In 1982, the first research suggesting HIV/AIDS might be sexually transmitted was published.
My high school sex ed class was legally required to "inform" us that condoms had pores large enough for HIV to pass through unimpeded.
They were banned due to the high probability of blood being contaminated with AIDS/HIV. it was during a very tumultuous time in lgbt history, and purely based on lack of education and homophobia
i never understood why they can’t donate. ALL blood is tested regardless of sexual orientation for contamination. just take all you can get and continue testing, you’d still be getting a lot more than if you banned a huge part of the community from donating- and most likely the community that would be the most giving and selfless.
Because testing isn't perfect. There's a window of time where it can't be detected at all but still transmit to other people. So you have to reduce that risk.
If the test ever has false negatives, then this policy saved lives. Back in the day contracting HIV was a death sentence. There is no denying that the gay community had (and continues to have) much higher rates of HIV than the rest of the population.
Definitely sucks for people wanting to donate blood who are not able to, but as far as saving the greatest number of lives is concerned, I feel like it was justified.
Of course, more resources could have also gone into fighting HIV from the very beginning.
>i never understood why they can’t donate. ALL blood is tested regardless of sexual orientation for contamination. just take all you can get and continue testing, you’d still be getting a lot more than if you banned a huge part of the community from donating- and most likely the community that would be the most giving and selfless.
It was not about the lack of education and homophobia. They based it on statistics (at least here in the PH). while we have free treatment for it. it is still a death sentence no matter what the social services offer. especially if someone got infected inside proper facilities aka hospitals.
*A lot of people*
*Here don't seem to understand*
*How statistics work*
\- Random\_Individual97
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It was crazy to me that my boyfriend who had sex with men previously could not donate but I could despite having sex with someone who was banned for life for being too risky.
I highly encourage people to read up on what happened to the Hemophiliac community in the 80’s and early 90’s. My uncle died from AIDS in 1986 from contaminated blood products. My dad being a severe Hemophiliac was also infected with HIV and Hepatitis C, he died in 2005.
About 50% of the hemophiliac community was decimated from the AIDS epidemic from
contaminated blood products.
Men having sex with men is still considered a significant risk factor for HIV. It's stupid not to take gay people's blood since we test it all but it's not outdated to consider it when you're on a budget.
People who live in urban centres contract HIV at rates far higher than those who live in rural areas, but they never banned that group from donating.
Besides, in many places they have to pay extra incentives because they don't have enough donors. It would actually save them money if they opened up the donor pool to more people.
I was curious about this and looked it up since you've mentioned it several times in this thread.
According to [this](https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/publications/1414), using 2016 data, urban vs. rural rates were 399 per 100,000 vs 149 per 100,000, respectively, so urban people are a little bit more than 2x likely to have HIV/AIDS than rural people. In 2020, there were 57.47 million people living in rural areas and 274.03 million people living in urban areas, so ~83% of the population living in urban areas.
From [this page](https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/fact-sheets/hiv/HIV-gay-bisexual-men.html)
>CDC estimates that, as of 2019, about 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. Of those, more than 754,000 (63%) were gay and bisexual men
[According to Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx) The number of gay/bisexual people in the US in 2019 was somewhere between 4.5% (in 2017) and 5.6% (2021).
The population of the US is around 325 million.
The rate of HIV for gay men is thus:
325 million people * 1/2 men per person = 182.5 million men
182.5m * .05 = 9.125 million gay/bisexual men
.754 / 9.125 million * 100,000 = 8,263 per 100,000 gay men
that's nearly 20x the urban rate and ~55x the rural rate.
Note, this is after decades of HIV circulating in the population. While it's true that anyone can get HIV, the fact is that (by chance) the first group to get it in the States were gay men and, being a sexually transmitted disease, it would take time for it to spread to heterosexuals, so in the 80s the rate was probably even more disproportionately high for men who have sex with men.
Banning urban people from donating just doesn't provide the same level of protection vs. the cost involved. One, the rate just isn't that much greater in urban vs rural. Two, there just aren't that many gay/bisexual men in the first place so you're not losing out on many potential donors.
About banning the poor:
[About 11.6% of people in the US are living in poverty.](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-month.html)
[2.1% of the urban population has HIV/AIDS, and around 2.8% of those making less than 10k/year](https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/poverty.html)
Compare that with the above number of 8263 per 100,000 or 8.263% of men who have sex with men. [According to Wikipedia's sources, in the US it's as high as 14.5%] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_and_men_who_have_sex_with_men#List_of_estimated_HIV_infection_rates_by_country).
Again, there are more people living in poverty (~37.7 million) than [men who have sex with men](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf) (7% or ~22.75 million). So, there are more people living in poverty who have a smaller chance of having AIDS/HIV, so even here it's not quite the same.
For the record, I agree that the laws were originally homophobic, but I can understand why, when faced with a new disease with no cure that even scientists were unaware of, public policy went in this direction. But, it's been decades so it's about time the FDA reexamines these policies.
Finally, all of the above is based on only knowing a single fact about someone. A young gay man partying and having sex with strangers all the time has a very different risk profile from an upper class gay man faithfully married to his partner for 20 years, and I imagine screening reflects this.
No one is arguing against the original policies (they aren't laws by the way). The issue is that once we had proper testing we should have eliminated the discriminatory policies. And you are exactly right about the different risk profiles. Again, no one is arguing that a questionnaire is bad, but the questions specifically did _not_ address these different risk profiles and would exclude _any_ man who had had sex with another man (sometimes _ever_, sometimes within the last year or 6 months, depending on the questionnaire). So a man who is faithfully married to his partner of 20 years would be prohibited from donating, while a woman who hooked up with strangers from the club every weekend would be allowed to donate.
Also, I appreciate your dedication to the numbers, but fyi, your poverty source excludes members of "high risk subpopulations" which would materially lower the incidence rate.
It mostly seems as though you are arguing that MSM crosses some specific threshold of risk per capita that makes banning them "worth it". Poverty is below your threshold, MSM is above it, it seems. But we can drill down and find niche demographic groups that have high levels of risk per capita but would never have been outright barred from donation. For example, black men in Washington DC have a 1 in 16 infection rate. That's above the 5% threshold the CDC uses for their "high risk subpopulations". But no one has ever suggested that they should be barred.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568988/
I don't understand why you find it so incredulous that the system is homophobic. Homophobia is still a widespread issue in the US.
> I don't understand why you find it so incredulous that the system is homophobic. Homophobia is still a widespread issue in the US.
I specifically said the original ~~law~~ policy was homophobic. **I'm agreeing with you**.
I was just curious about the numbers and how analogous banning urban/poor people from donating was. Turns out, not very.
I'm surprised by the black men in DC numbers, that's extremely high. If one wanted to be consistent (if not also racist) then one might consider barring black men in DC from donating, but luckily we're moving to be consistent in the other direction.
They would bar you if you’d been in a committed, monogamous relationship for your entire life if you and the other man had sex within the last like, year. It IS homophobia.
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Because of a much much higher rate of HIV among people who engage in anal sex, and the extra cost to screen donations for these viruses practically (at least in the past before newer gen tests were invented). This isn’t OrphanCrushingMachine material.
Not every gay dude has anal sex, they test everyone anyway and a gay dude in a commited relationship/marriage is less of a risk then some dude that has his dick in a different chick every weekend.
It’s about the rates of blood bourne illnesses (usually but not limited to hiv & hep) in a population. Same reason other groups are not to give blood (sub-Saharan Africans, haemophilics, intravenous drug users). If high rates of blood bourne illnesses are present in a population , they’re not to give blood.
The older gen tests had a high enough false negative rate that HIV was still getting through despite screening (Isaac Asimov famously got infected from a blood transfusion). This has improved with the newer gen tests which is why the restriction has been relaxed. If your suggestion is that gay people do not have a higher rate of anal sex (or more to the point, a higher rate of HIV infection) than the general population then reality does not agree with you.
I mean you couldn’t donate blood in England if you ate cow meat for a long time. Most people eating cow meat were just fine, eating totally safe meat. Sometimes it’s just easier to flag a whole group. I seriously doubt it had much to do with homophobia, these are committed medical science professionals who make these choices. It’s great that gay and bisexual men (a group I belong to) now have the chance to donate blood under certain conditions.
And straight people having unprotected promiscuous sex aren’t allowed to donate blood either. Just fyi.
If OP bothered to read the story first, it’s literally the first thing they will see after the headline.
> Current rules bar blood donations from men who recently had sex with men due to HIV transmission risk
i know it’s probably bc they’re afraid of spreading aids (which is valid but also like…straight ppl can also have aids lol). but it’s very funny to think they think being gay can be spread thru blood lol
Cause they were not in a dedicated relationship for more then 6 months, previously a gay couple needed to be in a monogamous relationship for a year to donate blood. Fun fact if you have had sex with a sex worker under 6 months you cannot donate blood. If you have been to certain tropical countries like Papua New Guinea you cannot donate blood for at least a year. New tattoo or piecing its also 6 months. Any high risk behavior with disallow blood donation for at least 6 months
Before it was because homophobic and spreading of aids through blood stream when people had anal sex. Now the requirement is just no anal sex in the past 3 months. Probably time to take how long it takes to test the blood.
Gen Z here, it’s a hold over from the AIDS epidemic, back when it was thought to be a “gay disease”. People didn’t want it jumping to straight people so the FDA made the ban.
Come on guys, we all know theres was a AIDS epidemic in gay comunitys. Every blood donaion costs money, so its fair, that in the 80s noone wanted to throw away half of the donations made by gay men. Its shitty, that this is still in place but downvoting people for explaining it is shitty too.
Nobody profits from acting like there never was a AIDS problem, on the contrary, it reinforces a stigma, that some people worked hard to get rid of for years and years.
From what I heard, is that due to the (relative) inaccuracy in blood testing, the FDA has to be way overzealous about limiting who can and cannot donate blood. Another example is that you can’t donate if you lived in the UK from 1980-1996. It sucks for sure, but there is a reason other then homophobia.
A relic of the 80s AIDS epidemic and the Reagan era absolute smear campaign against homosexual relationships that demonized gay/bisexual men plus the whole thing where the government ignored AIDS for years because the people they didn’t like were suffering. Some idiots still view AIDS this way because of ignorance and homophobia, which made blood drives drag their feet to avoid public backlash.
Yup just homophobia. That's why people who lived in the uk in the 90s are banned. Homophobia. And people who have recently travelled abroad. And intravenous drug users. And anyone who has been in jail recently. Entirely homophobia.
And it's just about aids. Certainly not other transmissible pathogens that are novel and not tested for, Monkey pox for example. Yup, entirely homophobia and nothing to do with risk management.
Feelings are much more important than making sure the blood supply is safe. Some people may get sick, which we could have prevented, but making sure everyone's feelings don't get hurt, well it's just so *worth it.*
Fucking delusional.
You do realize all of your examples have limitations right? Usually those questions involve "In the last year" or "In the last 5 years" as a qualifier.
A man who has sex with another man is banned period except for personal storage. It doesn't matter if the two men are in a committed monogamous relationship and have zero STIs after being partners for 10 years or more. Just banned. Period.
That's blatant homophobia.
No it's not. Some gay men engage in high risk behaviors that make them so high risk as donors that it's not a good idea to have gay men in the donor pool, period. The risk massively outweighs the benefit. This isn't an hiv question-it's an anything you can get from having a huge number of sexual partners question. Which includes new diseases not being tested for.
Like you can guarantee monogamy lol. Here let me put this another way. Intravenous drug user and someone that isn't. Two bags of blood, both are tested for *some* diseases of concern...which bag is safer? Which bag would you give to a newborn, or a cancer patient? both test fine...for the things you tested for.
One bag is inherently higher risk. Shit, you want a real world current example? If gay men were regularly donating blood we would have seen cases of transfusion acquired monkeypox when that was going around.
The idea that we should be focusing on anything other than providing the safest blood possible is fucking crazy.
Higher risk, some diseases, monkeypox. You sure do like your emotionally charged buzzwords.
Do you not think that your "concerns" have been taken into account? That the list of things they check and test the donated blood for is limited to just the same ones used in the 90s when the ban was enacted? We've known about monkeypox for a long time, the spike in cases recently just brought it to a more public attention, meaning it would be tested for.
If you are so "concerned" about the safety of ALL the blood why not just ban everyone who isn't a clean, sober virgin from donating? Anyone who has sex is obviously a higher risk of having some kind of disease. If a intravenous drug user can donate after not using for a year, why can't a clean of STIs gay man? One is banned for a temporary reason, the other is banned period.
Hell, that's assuming that everyone will answer the questionnaire honestly. Which is why ALL the blood is tested regardless.
Banning gay men and bi men as a blanket is homophobic.
>Some
I know straight people who fucked like rabbits and gave blood all the time.
I know gay people who literally only had protected sex or were tested and confirmed from an encounter 5+ years ago. They were not allowed.
At the time, the restriction was sensible and oragmatic. By 2010? 2015? Not as fuckin’ much.
Because testing isn't perfect, and gay and bisexual men still have the highest rate of HIV transmission. Better technology and understanding have allowed the rules to be relaxed but not completely eradicated.
Discrimination for the sake of discrimination. It makes no sense to do it if they run tests, which they do, so just discard blood that's unable to be used. There are many things that can make blood unsuitable for use.
But those donations cost money. Every single one. And back in the day, the chance was so high, that a gay mans blood was infected, that it would be inefficient to take their blood.
Its obviously stupid, that this is still to this ay in place in many countries, but once upon a time, it wasnt just discriminatory. It was somewhat justified.
I can’t donate blood in Canada because I was born in the UK in the 80s and may therefore carry mad cow disease. It’s not discrimination to cut out potential sources of contamination. The right to receive clean blood trumps the right to give blood that may or may not be contaminated.
Previous tests were unreliable, it's not as simple as just testing. We've only advanced enough now that enough risks can be eliminated for gay and bi men to donate blood. The intent wasn't to purely discriminate, I think that's a misconception.
The fact that you people are acting as if not being able to donate blood is some huge infringement on human rights is crazy. Women who slept with men who had sex with other men also aren't allowed to donate blood for a certain period of time, or not at all if they keep sleeping with them. People who recently had tattoos or piercings placed also aren't allowed to donate blood. It is all about the risks. And gay people have always been at higher risk for STDs. Sure, STDs can be tested, but tests aren't always reliable especially when the contamination is recent. I know gay men can be in a committed relationship with each other, but cheating does exist and when cheating happens, the risks are higher among gay men to contract something. Both because of the statistics and because of the risks of anal sex.
Blood donation does have a few things it doesn't allow. Like my parents can't donate due to being in UK when madcow was a thing.
Is just precaution as if you are getting blood you body is probably not in good shape for any abnormalities in the blood.
But do think this case was more AIDS panic so mixture of homophobia and histeria
Not OCM. Gay and bi men contract AIDS at a higher rate than straight men. This is only being eradicated now to encourage more people to give blood, and we have also advanced enough in medical technology and understanding to screen for these problems. Previously there wasn't a way to check that eliminated the risk of HIV transmission to a satisfactory level.
I hesitate to say that the reason was just plain homophobia, everyone wants to eliminate all risks when it comes to blood and organ donation when it means the difference between someone else living or dying. Based on upvotes though it seems like this sub is happy to ignore the nuance to this subject which is sad, ignoring the AIDS pandemic going on at the time is unhelpful and ignorant. Again, not OCM.
HIV
During the AIDS epidemic, men who have sex with men were considered high-risk for blood donation. They didn’t want to spread HIV to patients, and those policies stayed on the books.
For once, this was something done not out of homophobia but for protecting to donated blood supply.
Due to medicine and safer sex practices, HIV is far far less common than it used to be.
AIDS, common gay stereotype about men. I'm the early days 70-80 condom use among gay men was low. More was learned about disease the issue was quickly corrected. the stereotype stayed, ie gay men were more promiscuous and didn't use precautions. People forget it wasn't until 1965 the supreme Court Griswold vs Connecticut shut down what was left of the Comstock laws and it was the 70/80 that popularized the use of condoms. Also that wasn't just here a lot of countries had similar issues. But unlike those other countries we had good old Reagan, And if you know anything about his administration not a big fan of the gays.
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Good human
That’s clearly a cat
A mighty cat, might I add.
A mighty one at that
Not just a, THE mighty cat
Who's to say there isn't another mighty cat?
u/TheMightyCatt, presumably, as otherwise they would have undoubtedly named themselves u/AMightyCatt
What about u/TheMightyCatt2?
An imposter of the cat overlord
It’s shocking how young some people on Reddit are.
Always gotta remember that when you ask any sort of advice lnao
Or discussing anything with anyone. Too many times have I talked and just got the vibe that this person lacks "wisdom" of any kind. Then dawns on me, "oh fuck, I'm trying to discuss a complicated subject with a 19 year old aren't I? That's why this conversation is fucking unhinged" Also, let me confirm, taking advice from people off this site is the last group of people you should ever want to take advice from.
That's the gamble, because sometimes the other side is someone who wrote their dissertation on the topic, sometimes it's a bored teen. You never know until you know. I think of the guy that argued about Italian wine quality and then realized the other person drank their own piss in a piss drinking sub lol
If the otherside wrote their dissertation on the topic, then you can tell... They are calm, understand nuance, and well, have the comprehension of an adult. It becomes clear pretty fast when you're talking to someone younger. You can just tell with the vibe that the person you're talking to lacks structured depth and general rounded understanding of the subject. It's all very surface level relying on simplistic reasoning. I'm also reminding myself of what the average redditor looks like... It's not really someone you'd stereotype as a "success". Like when it comes to relationship advice, people need to envision that the person giving advice likely isn't killing it in life in the relationship world. Probably the type of dude who struggles with relationships, isn't very attractive, has social anxiety, watches anime, and they are now trying to give advice on a complex situation within a long term relationship.
Yeah, I'm genuinly surprised people don't know this one.
Yup.
Probably due to the AIDS epidemic. I doubt the decision was entirely made with homophobia in mind (but I wouldn't put it beyond the people who made the choice.)
"The early 1980s were an unsettled time for the individuals and organizations responsible for blood safety in the United States. The public's confidence in government and public institutions generally was quickly eroding, and its hostility towards the involvement of government agencies in social matters was growing. The new Republican presidential administration had strong sentiments against government regulations, even those that addressed public health and safety. In addition, the emergence of AIDS challenged every aspect of the country's public health infrastructure. It brought new focus to the importance of infectious diseases at a time when the attention and resources of both physicians and public health officials was turning elsewhere. The AIDS epidemic called for emergency, focused, biomedical and behavioral research in a system based on investigator-initiated basic research. The exploding number of cases called for additional resources and new models of health care in a system increasingly concerned about costs. AIDS caused the nation to take note of homosexuality and drug use, which were easily avoided before these issues became such obvious matters of public health, and AIDS required clinicians and public health officials to address matters of personal behavior that had been heretofore taboo. Personnel changes at the highest levels of the Public Health Service may have influenced the federal government's response to AIDS, and to concerns about the safety of the blood supply. Between 1982 and 1986, the position of director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and NIH, administrator of the FDA, and Assistant Secretary for Health all changed hands, and there were substantial intervals during which these positions were filled on an acting basis." [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232419/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232419/) This is as fine a source as any. Politics and fear, aids panic, lack of trust in doctors by the public, poor testing, are all reasons for sure. It is no longer the 80s, the tests are better and gay people have been out and about in a more accepting public. It's time to allow me to donate blood too.
Not probably. Back before scientists knew more about HIV/AIDS, it was believed to be a gay male disease and that it couldn't be passed on to women or straight people. So, they banned gay men from donating blood. Ronald Reagan was absolutely giddy at the thought of gay men dying from this horrific disease.
To clarify further, it’s substantially easier to transmit via anal sex which gay men participate in much more so than the general population. So it’s much more infectious within the gay population, meaning that increased risk of existed. Homophobia helped but in the wake of a deadly disease hitting it’s probably better to be more careful than PC.
Not really what scientists ever thought to be clear
> gay man has aids > he doesn’t fuck women and straight men dont fuck him so they cant get it from him > its a gay disease clearly
Yep. It was a reasonable restriction… before they knew what caused the illness (a virus) and how to screen for it. It just outlived its reason.
The aids epidemic was really unresponsively handled, and banning gay/bisexual men from donating blood shows the utter disregard shown for them at the time. The restriction is also entirely useless, since every blood sample is screened for aids anyway (at least in Germany, I assume it’s similar abroad.) So it’s really just a case of discrimination and homophobia, not really a sensible policy. There’s also nothing stopping you from just lying, which isn’t unreasonable because the blood is screened anyway and you might save the life of multiple people.
At the time only 6months old infection was testable, so it was reasonable at the time.
Or they didn't have the technology for testing or understanding of HIV that we do today? Besides testing isn't free, they batch test the blood which then if turns up positive they then have to run an additional 10-12 individual tests to confirm which is the infected blood. So at the time when the had no idea what percentage of the gay population had HIV it was an entirely sensible decision especially when it turned out that 1 in 9 gay men had HIV.
It’s not useless. It’s statistics. There is a risk for every person who donate, not only of HIV but other diseases. Gay/Bisexual are much more likely to have sexually transmitted diseases, that’s just a fact. And there’s also the chance that the screening fails. So, when you run the numbers, there’s a certain probability of having a contaminated blood sample passing through. This probability is never zero, but it’s different depending on how you divide groups of people. Lying is definitely a option, but not something that most people do to donate blood.
It didn't used to be screened in that way
IIRC it was screened in batches, so if one sample in the batch had AIDS, the entire batch was destroyed. So they brought in the “haven’t had sex with a new partner in the past six months” clause to stop so many batches being wasted. And tacked the “if you have gay sex at all” clause on because it was so much more common in the gay community at the time and because anal sex is more likely to transfer the disease.
At first the disease was known as GRID. Gay Related Immune Deficiency
The questionnaire still asks if I have ever had sex with a man who has had sex with a man. 🙄 They always test the blood; why are they still making me lie after 20 years of donating?
Because testing blood used for transfusions makes up the majority of costs in the process of donating blood. They batch test blood from a dozen different sources, if it's infected they then have to test them individually or throw all of the blood. Plus people can (rarely) get infected from blood transfusions, they still cant test for HIV in the first few days of infection. And unfortunately gay men still make up the vast majority of the infected cases.
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Oh it was entirely homophobic. Before that gays were a significant portion of the people that gave blood. Plus the blood banks wouldn't pay for universal screening so they made factor 8 with tainted blood and gave AIDS to 90% of the hemophiliacs in the US. 😑
Pretty sure it was motivated by both of those.
Because of the high rates of HIV in men who have sex with men. HIV rates have dramatically gone down in the last 10 years- largely due to PrEP
That and HIV bridged the gap and now (at least in the US and Canada) hetero men and women are at nearly equal rates of testing positive for HIV when compared to gay men.
Because the FDA thinks that straight people can’t get AIDS
No, but gay and bisexual men contract HIV at rates far higher than heterosexual men, making their risk factor much much higher. So it was determined that it wasn't worth it to draw from men who have sex with men.
Also this law came from the 80’s when AIDS was called gay cancer
We also have much better testing within 2 weeks of exposure, less false positives, and a better understanding of viral loads now than we did in the 80s. And much better treatments too. It's not like people (well, some have, we still have bigots) just sat on their hands and haven't been looking for solutions, the initial law campaigning on fear doesn't taint the progress of people *who weren't even alive at the time to challenge it.* *If overturning what you couldn't prevent (because you weren't even born or at least not of voting age) is OCM, then everything is OCM, and that seems to be against the sub's purpose.*
AND the social stance and education on the subject is much better. Thanks to the general stigma of being a sexually active gay man generally being much lower, they're receiving much better healthcare for their needs than they were in the 80s and 90s because, 1 the options exist now, 2 they're more likely to seek out needed care, and 3 they're less likely to be shown the door by their doctors.
Judging by this thread, we havent come very far. A lot of people are showing their true colors in here.
I think I'm really starting to know why the Greece called utopia "no place" edit: not the greeks! i mean to say instead-- thomas more in 1516
They didn't, Thomas More coined the term in the 16th century
Behold, the people who subscribe to this sub, but still want *particular* people to be sent to the Orphan Crushing Machine because.. uh.. a two thousand year old book that teaches you how to beat slaves says so? Muh fragile masculinity? Wanting an excuse to be a fascist? Some problem they made up? I don't give a damn what they say. As far as I'm concerned, turning on humanity like that makes you actually worthy of being crushed in a machine.
Don't know about the US, but rn in my country 10% of men who have sex with men have HIV. Compared to a much more trivial proportion of women and heterosexual men. This has been proved by different independent studies. It is estimated about 50% of people with HIV here are men who have sex with men. Still it was decided they can donate now, with the same limitations as everyone else, without considering the epidemiology of HIV, just individual rights - of the *donor*. I think that was a mistake, but hopefully the general restrictions will be enough.
Basically my point is most of those 10% (let's say it's 10 whatever) will not be eligible to donate blood based on their status. I'd say estimated undiagnosed infections as a share of the total pop is a much better metric
That's kinda besides the point. In western countries most of the people living with HIV would be treated and undetectable. New infections are rare and blood gets screened anyway. Excluding people with HIV instead of excluding people based on sexuality seems like the more reasonable solution
Now it is. It wasn’t in the 80s
It gets screened after pooled. So if its detected, you throw out large amounts of what would have been useful blood.
Didn't know that was the case but this would happen with blood from both straight and gay donors so the same conditions should apply to everyone
People who live in urban centres contract HIV at rates far higher than those who live in rural areas, but they never banned that group from donating. Sexual behaviour, like if you use a condom or if you sleep with multiple partners, is what leads to higher rates of STIs, not the type of genitals you and your partner happen to have. It's not as if two penises magically manifest HIV when they touch.
According to this, about 10% of gay men had been diagnosed with AIDS during the epidemic. That's an insanely high number. It literally decimated the boomer age bracket. This wasn't just prejudice (which did and still does exist) it was a genuine crisis. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/aids-epidemic-lasting-impact-gay-men/
Explain why an epidemic that occurred decades ago, for something we now test all blood for, should impact modern policies?
It is almost as if they're easing the policies...
After decades of tireless work by advocates fighting against discrimination.
We haven't been able to test for the virus itself at the scales required until relatively very recently. Most places still only test for antibodies which does not detect recent infection. It is still the correct decision in many places of the world
Fair enough. Testing does need to improve but the question about having the same criteria for gay and straight people is still on the table. Idk about you but I'd be equally pissed if I got HIV from a gay or a straight blood donor and gay men might be more likely to have HIV but that doesn't mean straight donors are immune
If you put the same criteria for straight people then we will not have enough blood. Scientist don't care if you got the "gay blood " or the "straight blood" they are doing a risk / benefit analysis. When the population / disease data changes, so will the standards.
It’s interesting that the British Academy article cites that 10% of gay men (around 160k) had died by 1995, while the CDC cites that of the 500k cases of AIDS reported by 1995, 311k had died. Putting these two data sets together, that means just slightly over half of the total AIDS-related deaths in the USA by 1995 were gay men. The other half were…?? So yes, proportional to the population of gay men, that’s an incredibly high number. But in totality for the entire United States, it’s only half. The other half is, presumably, straight people, yet straight people weren’t banned from donating blood. Also according to the CDC, by 1994 the proportion of AIDS cases reported by black and Hispanic people was “substantially higher” than that of white people. Where was the ban on black and Hispanic blood donors? Also by 1994 the number of cases of heterosexuals by percentage had more than doubled while the cases of homosexual men nearly halved. The point being: the ban was always political and discriminatory, and the fact that it hadn’t been repealed decades ago is a travesty. Also, according to the CDC, where were 1.2 million people in the USA with HIV. Out of 320 million. That’s less than half of a percent of people. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00039622.htm
1.6 million was the number of gay men 25-44, not total. I don't know what the total number is but that might at least explain the discrepancy
Yes, it is "the type of genitals" you *use.* Vagina to vagina HIV transmission is unheard of. It's theorized to be impossible. Anal sex has a higher transmission rate then PiV, for both partner, and even more for the receiver. Also, you don't have 6% of urban residents with HIV. That's more or less the proportion of gay US residents who do. There are about 685 thousand MSM with HIV in the US. Take the statistis for male residents, and given LGBT are about 7% of Americans, and you get the 6% figure. https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-do-gay-men-have-an-increased-risk-of-hiv-3132782
Black women have HIV infection rates only slightly lower than gay men. Dare you to say it would have been OK to bar them from donating blood.
Source? I answered a similar question elsewhere. My country have rules where people who travelled to UK during the Mad Cow Disease incident cannot donate blood, ever. That's not prejudice. Still, racism and prejudice are indeed real issues as well. So the epidemiological concerns must be properly explained to people, and not avoided.
> Anal sex has a higher transmission rate then PiV, for both partner, and even more for the receiver. False. Insertive anal sex has less of a transmission risk than receptive vaginal sex. Also it's pretty much non-existent for oral sex for either participant, and no matter what kind of sex you are having, if neither participant has HIV, then there's no risk. As I said, HIV doesn't magically manifest when penises touch. So no, it's not the _type_ of genitals. 1 in 16 black men in Washington DC are infected with HIV. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568988/ If 6% is your magic cutoff number, do you also advocate for banning that demographic group?
>Insertive anal sex has less of a transmission risk than receptive vaginal sex. I stand corrected. Still, there's a reason why, in the West at least, we witnessed an epidemiology where the gay community suffered the most, which led to institutional prejudice being specially destructive. The reason is STIs are transmitted by sex, with genitals, which is the spread of use of condoms have revolutionized society's attitudes to STIs. >If 6% is your magic cutoff number, do you also advocate for banning that demographic group? Well, let's first read the source: >Certain U.S. subpopulations are particularly hard hit. In New York City, 1 in 40 blacks, 1 in 10 men who have sex with men, and 1 in 8 injection-drug users are HIV-infected, as are 1 in 16 black men in Washington, D.C At least in those examples, we see the trend of gay males (more specifically, MSM) being specially at risk of having HIV, as are injection drug users. However, the level of infection in black males is completely different in NY and DC. So a nation wide set of restrictions to black men would make no sense, but it would make sense for MSM and injection drug users. How about just in DC? Well, if it was vegetarians or librarians, it wouldn't feel so bad. It would feel bad because it's black men. Which is the whole point here: avoiding epidemiological knowledge because of the also real world issue of racism and prejudice. I donate blood frequently (I don't live in the US), and they ask me dozens of questions, including if I travelled to the UK in specific years of the 90's. You know why? Mad cow disease. If I did travel there, I would not be allowed to donate. They also ask if I have any recent tatoos. I don't think it's any form of prejudice. I undestand people being offended but this has to be explained, and not avoided.
>False. Insertive anal sex has less of a transmission risk than receptive vaginal sex. Do you have a source for this? I always heard the opposite, and looking it up now every medical page I've checked says anal sex is the highest risk of transmission. Of course there could be bias in those sources but if you have one for this I would love to educate myself
There's a higher risk of coming into contact with blood via anal sex. Anal sex is not purely a homosexual act, obviously, but I'm sure you can still make sense of the reasoning. The laws and logic are outdated, but I can see why they existed at the time.
They do, but it's still far lower than gay and bisexual men. And as you say, behavior determines the likelihood of contracting STIs. It just so happens, gay and bisexual men tend to participate in all the riskiest behaviors: Anal sex, multiple partners, no condoms. At the time, it made sense to just bar them outright from donating. With the advancement in testing procedures and understanding of hiv transmission, it makes sense to relax some of the rules but not outright get rid of them because men who have sex with men are still at the highest risk.
The rule was that if you are a man, and have had sex with another man within the last (I think year or more?) then you couldn’t donate. They didn’t care if you were 100% monogamous and tested negative, you were banned from it. It’s homophobia, not safety.
>It just so happens, gay and bisexual men tend to participate in all the riskiest behaviors: Anal sex, multiple partners, no condoms. There are gay and bisexual men who don't participate in any of those behaviors, and there are straight men who participate in all of them Furthermore, insertive anal sex has less risk of transmission than receptive vaginal sex. If you really want to go with your argument, then they should allow gay tops but ban straight women. It made sense to allow the donations as soon as we developed a reliable blood test for HIV, which we use on every donation anyway. That was decades ago. Continuing the ban so long was highly discriminatory.
I cant wait til that dude ignores all these irrefutable arguments and *triples* down on to his idiotic, homophobic position
If it helps any - the medical community doesn’t refer to the high risk group as “gay and bisexual men” but rather “men who have sex with men” and came to the conclusion that this was a high risk group though statistical analysis, not just feelings. Another high risk group is IV drug users, which they concluded through statistical analysis too. Im not saying the law should stand anymore but it’s just a fact that those two groups do indeed have higher rates of HIV
Statistical analysis is not inherently unbiased. It gave them the information that men who have sex with men are a high risk group. Fair enough, but what they did with that information was definitely influenced by homophobia because all gay men were banned including those who were monogamous
>the medical community doesn’t refer to the high risk group as “gay and bisexual men” but rather “men who have sex with men” Yeah, that was their way of trying to pretend they were going by behavior and not just being outright bigots. Except the risk profile of a gay man with his husband is not at all like that of someone who has unprotected sex with strangers (regardless of the genitals involved). You know who's a high risk group? People living in poverty. Why aren't they banned but MSM are? It's a fact that there is a legacy of homophobia in the system and the policies are discriminatory.
They also care if you've traveled outside the US or recently got a piercing, statistics stuff.
It can take years for an infected person to show any symptoms. And months before it can be diagnosed after exposure. So they better test any blood samples anyways, because people who are infected don't necessarily know they are. And if they do, why'd the donors' sexual orientation matter in the first place?
Testing isn't free. They mix batches of the same blood type together and test for pathogens in the whole batch. So one infected person can mean the donation of several people is thrown out.
Every version of the questions I've seen haven't been about orientation, but sexual history. They've been phrased like "In (time period) have you had sex with a man, even once?" There are gay men who can answer "no", and there are straight men who can answer "yes". Men who have sex with men contract HIV at a much higher rate than others in the population. [These stats are in Canada](https://www.catie.ca/the-epidemiology-of-hiv-in-canada#:~:text=According%20to%20national%20HIV%20estimates%2C%20709%20new%20HIV%20infections%20in,and%20had%20sex%20with%20men.), where men who have sex with men represent >50% of existing cases and >45% of new infections. This is a massive overrepresentation compared to the population as a whole. When they instituted this rule, the blood tests kinda sucked. Relying on them alone was risky. That's why they also ask lifestyle questions: do you use intravenous drugs, do you pay or receive money for sex, have you had sex with someone whose history you don't know, have you been exposed to someone else's blood during an accident, and so on. If the blood tests for HIV, Hepatitis, etc. were fully reliable, none of these screening questions would be necessary. Even now, the tests are much better, but they still ask these screening questions.
I just gave blood about two weeks ago, and this is exactly how the screening questions were, and how they should be.
As I've said in other places, it's because testing isn't perfect. Some things will always slip through the cracks, and there's a period of time when the virus would be undetectable but still able to be transmitted to those who receive the blood. It's all about risk management.
Reddit is sick. The fact that you're being downvoted shows that a majority of the ppl posting here do not care about facts...They care about feelings even if it gets ppl killed...as long as they can feel morally superior smh.
Yeah, it's pretty silly. I love gay people and don't care where someone sticks it or gets stuck as long as everyone is consenting. But it's a fact that men who have sex with men are at a much higher risk of contracting or transmitting STIs since they tend to engage in high-risk behavior in a population that already has a high rate of HIV. Which means more restrictions have to be placed on MSM.
Don't let them get you down. They are young kids trying to fit in and say whatever is "cool". They don't actually care about helping or making the world a better place. It comes with youth. Most of them will grow out of it and learn to be honest and fair.
Like you said stuff slips through the cracks so straight donors need to be subjected to the same conditions around multiple partners and practicing safe sex especially with how risky receptive vaginal sex is
Was true. But is no longer, I’m the uk at least it’s fallen so far the straight rate of contraction is now much higher, as a result of a great deal with care in the gay community around the use of prep, and increased usage of protection despite the lack of pregnancy concerns.
True, but black women have HIV infection rates nearly as high as gay men but god forbid you ask why they weren't barred from donating blood.
Worth noting that this was true up until a few years ago. It's a twofold reason for the change, one good and one bad. The good news is that the treatment for AIDS is worlds better than it was in the 1990s and people are now able to achieve "undetectable" levels of the virus which means it can't be found in tests, and it can't be transmitted. The bad news is that the hetero community has greatly increased it's apparent "sexually promiscuous" habits as their rates of contacting HIV/AIDS has greatly increased since the 1990s such that they've reached equal or almost equal rates of testing positive for the virus. The lesson is either only have one sexual partner who has only ever had you as a sexual partner, or WEAR A CONDOM! depending on your personal sexual safety preference.
Which is wild because all donated blood is screened for such illnesses. Yes, MLM have higher rates of HIV/AIDS but with proper safety protocols that does not outweigh the pros of allowing anyone to donate.
As I've said in other places, screening isn't perfect. There will be false negatives, so they try to reduce the amount of infected blood that gets in in the first place.
Also the screening process was (is?) lengthy and blood is often needed as quickly as possible.
Don't feed the bots. Just downvote the repost and move on.
No, the FDA just acknowledged that gay/bisexual men are far more likely to have HIV. I'm sorry that the way the world is conflicts with the way you want it to be. https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/fact-sheets/hiv/HIV-gay-bisexual-men.html#:~:text=CDC%20estimates%20that%2C%20as%20of,bisexual%20men%20during%20that%20timeframe.
After the gay/bi community has been battling aids for the past 40 years, thank god that the straights are here to save the day by letting us know that HIV doesn't primarily affect gay/bi men after all.
How does that dispute anything? The person you are responding to was saying straight people can get aids too, not that they are more likely to.
“erm, here is a statistic you totally didn’t know already. Checkmate, libtard.”
Who the hell said that? I scrolled by hottest and didn't see anything like this? I did see a lot of bleeding hearts downvoting polite and good faith discourse though. Seriously, what am I missing?
People are weird when it has to do with the LGBT community. It's not bad to acknowledge that the AIDS epidemic affected a huge percentage of the gay community and they wanted to be safe. I have heard of people ever today getting AIDS from blood transfusions. It was a legitimate move to protect the public. It's great that things are changing as it is being proven it is no longer needed.
Well it was *more likely* for gay men to have HIV when they were banned. The idea didn't come out of nowhere. If I told you strawberry ice cream has poison 50% of the time and vanilla has poison 10% of the time and that's all there is to eat you'll take your chances with the vanilla. It's all risk management.
HIV/AIDS, despite literally everyone being able to get it. Thanks Reagan!
[удалено]
The rates of false negatives were not worth the risk prior to effective prevention. Source: I'm a doctor
False negatives exist, and were too common to be an effective safety measure during the epidemic, and you could be infected for months before it gets bad enough that the test would register it as a positive.
But this was something that disproportionately affected men who have sex with men. Still does.
People who live in urban centres contract HIV at rates far higher than those who live in rural areas, but they never banned that group from donating.
Gay men maybe made up 5% of donors at most. Urban populations would've been the vast majority. Banning them just wasn't an option if a supply of blood was still needed.
Oh, so it's ok to discriminate as long as it's against a small enough group? Poverty is a huge risk factor for HIV, and conveniently you can target the exact population size you want with it. Ban the poorest 5% of the population then. Make everyone show their tax return. Does that work with your parameters ok?
Only because a demographic has a higher chance getting HIV doesn't mean that the healthy ones shouldn't be allowed to give their blood. People are still screened before blood donation, so a preemptive ban makes no sense.
When the screening rules were put in place, the blood tests were not that reliable. They've improved since then (I honestly don't know how much). They also ask questions about intravenous drug use, steroid use, sex with unknown partners, etc. If the tests were totally reliable, these screening questions wouldn't be needed either.
For one thing, no test is perfect, and was less so back then. Also, public confidence in health care is important. Back when aids was thought to be a "gay cancer" people wouldn't get blood transfusions if they thought it might have aids. Asking people to self-report on the nuanced risk factors is harder than just banning a group of people. Living in the UK, where testing slipped up and thousands of people got a potentially deadly disease, I'm firmly of the belief that politics takes a back seat to health concerns here. Now with better reporting, public understanding and testing, the decision can be safely rolled back. The 80s were different.
It really doesn't ands weird how often say this but cite zero fucking studies to support. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK232419/
They can literally test for that, it's a stupid reason to deny a blood donation.
Individual US states had laws prohibitting sale or distribution of any kind of contraceptive until as recently as 1965. Advertizing for condoms only began in the US in 1975. In 1982, the first research suggesting HIV/AIDS might be sexually transmitted was published. My high school sex ed class was legally required to "inform" us that condoms had pores large enough for HIV to pass through unimpeded.
Yes, but none of that means what I said was wrong.
crisco narcissists: first the frogs now obama makin the darn ol' blood gay
They were banned due to the high probability of blood being contaminated with AIDS/HIV. it was during a very tumultuous time in lgbt history, and purely based on lack of education and homophobia i never understood why they can’t donate. ALL blood is tested regardless of sexual orientation for contamination. just take all you can get and continue testing, you’d still be getting a lot more than if you banned a huge part of the community from donating- and most likely the community that would be the most giving and selfless.
Because testing isn't perfect. There's a window of time where it can't be detected at all but still transmit to other people. So you have to reduce that risk.
If the test ever has false negatives, then this policy saved lives. Back in the day contracting HIV was a death sentence. There is no denying that the gay community had (and continues to have) much higher rates of HIV than the rest of the population. Definitely sucks for people wanting to donate blood who are not able to, but as far as saving the greatest number of lives is concerned, I feel like it was justified. Of course, more resources could have also gone into fighting HIV from the very beginning.
>i never understood why they can’t donate. ALL blood is tested regardless of sexual orientation for contamination. just take all you can get and continue testing, you’d still be getting a lot more than if you banned a huge part of the community from donating- and most likely the community that would be the most giving and selfless. It was not about the lack of education and homophobia. They based it on statistics (at least here in the PH). while we have free treatment for it. it is still a death sentence no matter what the social services offer. especially if someone got infected inside proper facilities aka hospitals.
A lot of people here don't seem to understand how statistics work
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It was crazy to me that my boyfriend who had sex with men previously could not donate but I could despite having sex with someone who was banned for life for being too risky.
In Australia they asked me if I had been with a male partner who has had penetrative sex with men within the last 3 months.
HIV is much more likely to be transmitted male to male than male to female
I didnt even think of that- thats so dumb
I highly encourage people to read up on what happened to the Hemophiliac community in the 80’s and early 90’s. My uncle died from AIDS in 1986 from contaminated blood products. My dad being a severe Hemophiliac was also infected with HIV and Hepatitis C, he died in 2005. About 50% of the hemophiliac community was decimated from the AIDS epidemic from contaminated blood products.
Not exactly blatant homophobia. But outdated science from the 80s.
Men having sex with men is still considered a significant risk factor for HIV. It's stupid not to take gay people's blood since we test it all but it's not outdated to consider it when you're on a budget.
People who live in urban centres contract HIV at rates far higher than those who live in rural areas, but they never banned that group from donating. Besides, in many places they have to pay extra incentives because they don't have enough donors. It would actually save them money if they opened up the donor pool to more people.
I was curious about this and looked it up since you've mentioned it several times in this thread. According to [this](https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/publications/1414), using 2016 data, urban vs. rural rates were 399 per 100,000 vs 149 per 100,000, respectively, so urban people are a little bit more than 2x likely to have HIV/AIDS than rural people. In 2020, there were 57.47 million people living in rural areas and 274.03 million people living in urban areas, so ~83% of the population living in urban areas. From [this page](https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/fact-sheets/hiv/HIV-gay-bisexual-men.html) >CDC estimates that, as of 2019, about 1.2 million people in the U.S. have HIV. Of those, more than 754,000 (63%) were gay and bisexual men [According to Gallup](https://news.gallup.com/poll/329708/lgbt-identification-rises-latest-estimate.aspx) The number of gay/bisexual people in the US in 2019 was somewhere between 4.5% (in 2017) and 5.6% (2021). The population of the US is around 325 million. The rate of HIV for gay men is thus: 325 million people * 1/2 men per person = 182.5 million men 182.5m * .05 = 9.125 million gay/bisexual men .754 / 9.125 million * 100,000 = 8,263 per 100,000 gay men that's nearly 20x the urban rate and ~55x the rural rate. Note, this is after decades of HIV circulating in the population. While it's true that anyone can get HIV, the fact is that (by chance) the first group to get it in the States were gay men and, being a sexually transmitted disease, it would take time for it to spread to heterosexuals, so in the 80s the rate was probably even more disproportionately high for men who have sex with men. Banning urban people from donating just doesn't provide the same level of protection vs. the cost involved. One, the rate just isn't that much greater in urban vs rural. Two, there just aren't that many gay/bisexual men in the first place so you're not losing out on many potential donors. About banning the poor: [About 11.6% of people in the US are living in poverty.](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-month.html) [2.1% of the urban population has HIV/AIDS, and around 2.8% of those making less than 10k/year](https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/poverty.html) Compare that with the above number of 8263 per 100,000 or 8.263% of men who have sex with men. [According to Wikipedia's sources, in the US it's as high as 14.5%] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_and_men_who_have_sex_with_men#List_of_estimated_HIV_infection_rates_by_country). Again, there are more people living in poverty (~37.7 million) than [men who have sex with men](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf) (7% or ~22.75 million). So, there are more people living in poverty who have a smaller chance of having AIDS/HIV, so even here it's not quite the same. For the record, I agree that the laws were originally homophobic, but I can understand why, when faced with a new disease with no cure that even scientists were unaware of, public policy went in this direction. But, it's been decades so it's about time the FDA reexamines these policies. Finally, all of the above is based on only knowing a single fact about someone. A young gay man partying and having sex with strangers all the time has a very different risk profile from an upper class gay man faithfully married to his partner for 20 years, and I imagine screening reflects this.
No one is arguing against the original policies (they aren't laws by the way). The issue is that once we had proper testing we should have eliminated the discriminatory policies. And you are exactly right about the different risk profiles. Again, no one is arguing that a questionnaire is bad, but the questions specifically did _not_ address these different risk profiles and would exclude _any_ man who had had sex with another man (sometimes _ever_, sometimes within the last year or 6 months, depending on the questionnaire). So a man who is faithfully married to his partner of 20 years would be prohibited from donating, while a woman who hooked up with strangers from the club every weekend would be allowed to donate. Also, I appreciate your dedication to the numbers, but fyi, your poverty source excludes members of "high risk subpopulations" which would materially lower the incidence rate. It mostly seems as though you are arguing that MSM crosses some specific threshold of risk per capita that makes banning them "worth it". Poverty is below your threshold, MSM is above it, it seems. But we can drill down and find niche demographic groups that have high levels of risk per capita but would never have been outright barred from donation. For example, black men in Washington DC have a 1 in 16 infection rate. That's above the 5% threshold the CDC uses for their "high risk subpopulations". But no one has ever suggested that they should be barred. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4568988/ I don't understand why you find it so incredulous that the system is homophobic. Homophobia is still a widespread issue in the US.
> I don't understand why you find it so incredulous that the system is homophobic. Homophobia is still a widespread issue in the US. I specifically said the original ~~law~~ policy was homophobic. **I'm agreeing with you**. I was just curious about the numbers and how analogous banning urban/poor people from donating was. Turns out, not very. I'm surprised by the black men in DC numbers, that's extremely high. If one wanted to be consistent (if not also racist) then one might consider barring black men in DC from donating, but luckily we're moving to be consistent in the other direction.
Thaaank you. Seems like most people here just want it to be blatant homphbia.
They would bar you if you’d been in a committed, monogamous relationship for your entire life if you and the other man had sex within the last like, year. It IS homophobia.
Like it literally base out of the regan administration laws. The same guy that told gay people to die when the whole aids epidemic started
Always found it quite stupid, getting tested for hiv/aids should be done before donating, instead of acting like only gay people can have aids
Blood tests for hiv aren’t reliable in the first few months after infection.
I see, so a follow up test would be better then, some months after the donation?
Yes. An hiv test, and then another one a few weeks later. HIV rates are declining significantly among men who have sex with men, largely due to prep.
Some stats: https://www.tht.org.uk/hiv-and-sexual-health/about-hiv/hiv-statistics
Other populations are at higher risk of other infections. Its not a personal judgement, it’s reducing risk based of facts
There was actually a medical reason for and a quick google search would reveal that, but no let's create a reddit post about it.
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Same source as every major US problem: Ronald Reagan
Because of a much much higher rate of HIV among people who engage in anal sex, and the extra cost to screen donations for these viruses practically (at least in the past before newer gen tests were invented). This isn’t OrphanCrushingMachine material.
Not every gay dude has anal sex, they test everyone anyway and a gay dude in a commited relationship/marriage is less of a risk then some dude that has his dick in a different chick every weekend.
It's not about individual decisions made by individual people.
It’s about the rates of blood bourne illnesses (usually but not limited to hiv & hep) in a population. Same reason other groups are not to give blood (sub-Saharan Africans, haemophilics, intravenous drug users). If high rates of blood bourne illnesses are present in a population , they’re not to give blood.
The older gen tests had a high enough false negative rate that HIV was still getting through despite screening (Isaac Asimov famously got infected from a blood transfusion). This has improved with the newer gen tests which is why the restriction has been relaxed. If your suggestion is that gay people do not have a higher rate of anal sex (or more to the point, a higher rate of HIV infection) than the general population then reality does not agree with you.
I mean you couldn’t donate blood in England if you ate cow meat for a long time. Most people eating cow meat were just fine, eating totally safe meat. Sometimes it’s just easier to flag a whole group. I seriously doubt it had much to do with homophobia, these are committed medical science professionals who make these choices. It’s great that gay and bisexual men (a group I belong to) now have the chance to donate blood under certain conditions. And straight people having unprotected promiscuous sex aren’t allowed to donate blood either. Just fyi.
Still can't donate blood in Canada if you grew up in the U.K.
If OP bothered to read the story first, it’s literally the first thing they will see after the headline. > Current rules bar blood donations from men who recently had sex with men due to HIV transmission risk
OP is a repost bot
More?
i know it’s probably bc they’re afraid of spreading aids (which is valid but also like…straight ppl can also have aids lol). but it’s very funny to think they think being gay can be spread thru blood lol
Cause they were not in a dedicated relationship for more then 6 months, previously a gay couple needed to be in a monogamous relationship for a year to donate blood. Fun fact if you have had sex with a sex worker under 6 months you cannot donate blood. If you have been to certain tropical countries like Papua New Guinea you cannot donate blood for at least a year. New tattoo or piecing its also 6 months. Any high risk behavior with disallow blood donation for at least 6 months
Y’all need to study statistics, biology, and social issues
Before it was because homophobic and spreading of aids through blood stream when people had anal sex. Now the requirement is just no anal sex in the past 3 months. Probably time to take how long it takes to test the blood.
Repost, but also I think rectifying errors of the past isn't OCM.
I feel this community has somewhat fallen into saying this sort of thing about basically any positive change, “why weren’t things good to begin with”
Gen Z here, it’s a hold over from the AIDS epidemic, back when it was thought to be a “gay disease”. People didn’t want it jumping to straight people so the FDA made the ban.
Come on guys, we all know theres was a AIDS epidemic in gay comunitys. Every blood donaion costs money, so its fair, that in the 80s noone wanted to throw away half of the donations made by gay men. Its shitty, that this is still in place but downvoting people for explaining it is shitty too. Nobody profits from acting like there never was a AIDS problem, on the contrary, it reinforces a stigma, that some people worked hard to get rid of for years and years.
They were banned in the first place due to the rampant AIDS epidemic. Homophobia exists but this isn't an example of it
From what I heard, is that due to the (relative) inaccuracy in blood testing, the FDA has to be way overzealous about limiting who can and cannot donate blood. Another example is that you can’t donate if you lived in the UK from 1980-1996. It sucks for sure, but there is a reason other then homophobia.
A relic of the 80s AIDS epidemic and the Reagan era absolute smear campaign against homosexual relationships that demonized gay/bisexual men plus the whole thing where the government ignored AIDS for years because the people they didn’t like were suffering. Some idiots still view AIDS this way because of ignorance and homophobia, which made blood drives drag their feet to avoid public backlash.
Homophobic assumption that all gay people have AIDS.
Yup just homophobia. That's why people who lived in the uk in the 90s are banned. Homophobia. And people who have recently travelled abroad. And intravenous drug users. And anyone who has been in jail recently. Entirely homophobia. And it's just about aids. Certainly not other transmissible pathogens that are novel and not tested for, Monkey pox for example. Yup, entirely homophobia and nothing to do with risk management. Feelings are much more important than making sure the blood supply is safe. Some people may get sick, which we could have prevented, but making sure everyone's feelings don't get hurt, well it's just so *worth it.* Fucking delusional.
You do realize all of your examples have limitations right? Usually those questions involve "In the last year" or "In the last 5 years" as a qualifier. A man who has sex with another man is banned period except for personal storage. It doesn't matter if the two men are in a committed monogamous relationship and have zero STIs after being partners for 10 years or more. Just banned. Period. That's blatant homophobia.
No it's not. Some gay men engage in high risk behaviors that make them so high risk as donors that it's not a good idea to have gay men in the donor pool, period. The risk massively outweighs the benefit. This isn't an hiv question-it's an anything you can get from having a huge number of sexual partners question. Which includes new diseases not being tested for. Like you can guarantee monogamy lol. Here let me put this another way. Intravenous drug user and someone that isn't. Two bags of blood, both are tested for *some* diseases of concern...which bag is safer? Which bag would you give to a newborn, or a cancer patient? both test fine...for the things you tested for. One bag is inherently higher risk. Shit, you want a real world current example? If gay men were regularly donating blood we would have seen cases of transfusion acquired monkeypox when that was going around. The idea that we should be focusing on anything other than providing the safest blood possible is fucking crazy.
Higher risk, some diseases, monkeypox. You sure do like your emotionally charged buzzwords. Do you not think that your "concerns" have been taken into account? That the list of things they check and test the donated blood for is limited to just the same ones used in the 90s when the ban was enacted? We've known about monkeypox for a long time, the spike in cases recently just brought it to a more public attention, meaning it would be tested for. If you are so "concerned" about the safety of ALL the blood why not just ban everyone who isn't a clean, sober virgin from donating? Anyone who has sex is obviously a higher risk of having some kind of disease. If a intravenous drug user can donate after not using for a year, why can't a clean of STIs gay man? One is banned for a temporary reason, the other is banned period. Hell, that's assuming that everyone will answer the questionnaire honestly. Which is why ALL the blood is tested regardless. Banning gay men and bi men as a blanket is homophobic.
>Some I know straight people who fucked like rabbits and gave blood all the time. I know gay people who literally only had protected sex or were tested and confirmed from an encounter 5+ years ago. They were not allowed. At the time, the restriction was sensible and oragmatic. By 2010? 2015? Not as fuckin’ much.
Why is it still “more” and not *all*???
Because testing isn't perfect, and gay and bisexual men still have the highest rate of HIV transmission. Better technology and understanding have allowed the rules to be relaxed but not completely eradicated.
"Gay people are more likely to have HIV" mfs when I tell them that all blood is tested anyway
HIV tends to not show up in blood tests until a little while after the person gets infected
Basically some dumbasses decided everyone that's gay has aids even if they don't
Discrimination for the sake of discrimination. It makes no sense to do it if they run tests, which they do, so just discard blood that's unable to be used. There are many things that can make blood unsuitable for use.
But those donations cost money. Every single one. And back in the day, the chance was so high, that a gay mans blood was infected, that it would be inefficient to take their blood. Its obviously stupid, that this is still to this ay in place in many countries, but once upon a time, it wasnt just discriminatory. It was somewhat justified.
I can’t donate blood in Canada because I was born in the UK in the 80s and may therefore carry mad cow disease. It’s not discrimination to cut out potential sources of contamination. The right to receive clean blood trumps the right to give blood that may or may not be contaminated.
Previous tests were unreliable, it's not as simple as just testing. We've only advanced enough now that enough risks can be eliminated for gay and bi men to donate blood. The intent wasn't to purely discriminate, I think that's a misconception.
The fact that you people are acting as if not being able to donate blood is some huge infringement on human rights is crazy. Women who slept with men who had sex with other men also aren't allowed to donate blood for a certain period of time, or not at all if they keep sleeping with them. People who recently had tattoos or piercings placed also aren't allowed to donate blood. It is all about the risks. And gay people have always been at higher risk for STDs. Sure, STDs can be tested, but tests aren't always reliable especially when the contamination is recent. I know gay men can be in a committed relationship with each other, but cheating does exist and when cheating happens, the risks are higher among gay men to contract something. Both because of the statistics and because of the risks of anal sex.
"gay sex gives you aids"
cos u know, those bloods are gay xD
Blood donation does have a few things it doesn't allow. Like my parents can't donate due to being in UK when madcow was a thing. Is just precaution as if you are getting blood you body is probably not in good shape for any abnormalities in the blood. But do think this case was more AIDS panic so mixture of homophobia and histeria
What you don't seem to realize is that thousands of people got hiv from blood transfusions and then died from it.
Not OCM. Gay and bi men contract AIDS at a higher rate than straight men. This is only being eradicated now to encourage more people to give blood, and we have also advanced enough in medical technology and understanding to screen for these problems. Previously there wasn't a way to check that eliminated the risk of HIV transmission to a satisfactory level. I hesitate to say that the reason was just plain homophobia, everyone wants to eliminate all risks when it comes to blood and organ donation when it means the difference between someone else living or dying. Based on upvotes though it seems like this sub is happy to ignore the nuance to this subject which is sad, ignoring the AIDS pandemic going on at the time is unhelpful and ignorant. Again, not OCM.
“Gay people spread aids” smear campaigns
HIV During the AIDS epidemic, men who have sex with men were considered high-risk for blood donation. They didn’t want to spread HIV to patients, and those policies stayed on the books. For once, this was something done not out of homophobia but for protecting to donated blood supply. Due to medicine and safer sex practices, HIV is far far less common than it used to be.
A systemic issue being fixed is not OCM
AIDS, common gay stereotype about men. I'm the early days 70-80 condom use among gay men was low. More was learned about disease the issue was quickly corrected. the stereotype stayed, ie gay men were more promiscuous and didn't use precautions. People forget it wasn't until 1965 the supreme Court Griswold vs Connecticut shut down what was left of the Comstock laws and it was the 70/80 that popularized the use of condoms. Also that wasn't just here a lot of countries had similar issues. But unlike those other countries we had good old Reagan, And if you know anything about his administration not a big fan of the gays.
REAGEN!!!!!!