And now the FDA wants to use the same asinine rules for sperm donation as for blood donation

[conuly]

Instead of testing donors to make sure they're not sick, they'd rather just exclude a huge swath of the population from donating.

Brilliant plan, guys. Really.

Comments

[stejcruetekie.livejournal.com]

Err, it's not *that* large a segment of the population...

And I'm sorry, but I have to agree with it - when you have an already risky procedure, you want to eliminate the known parts that make it even riskier. I certainly wouldn't be comfortable accepting something (blood, sperm, whatever) from a place that I knew accepted higher risks.

Safety first.

[conuly]

Excuse me? 10% (at least. Could be higher, as this number doesn't include bisexuals) isn't a large segment of the population?

Excuse me? A gay man in a committed relationship is more of a risk than a straight man who will admit he's seen several prostitutes and has lots of fun at parties?

Excuse me? Forbidding certain groups from donating is safer than simply testing all donors?

[leora.livejournal.com]

It's high and getting higher...
You're not supposed to have been in a gay/bi sex act or been with anyone who has been or been with anyone who has been with anyone who has been and so forth. If people were honest, this would rule out... almost everyone I know.

[stejcruetekie.livejournal.com]

1. You said "huge." 10% to me does not classify as "huge." Assuming it's even 10%. 10% has been the *upper* number I've heard, and that's from the gay rights organizations. Religious groups say it's 1% or 2%. Both sides no doubt inflate (or deflate) their nummbers. So if we went middle of the road, we could say it's really 5%.

2. I would hazard a guess that the number of committed gay relationships is a substantially smaller ratio of the entire gay population, compared to committed straight relationships. Certainly from my own personal observations (and yes, I have known quite a few gays) I have no qualms about saying that gays are much more promiscuous than heterosexuals -- even when they are in a "committed" relationship.

3. Tests are not failsafe. They do give false positives, and false negatives. When you eliminate the high risk doners, you eliminate the highest risk of a false test result hurting someone.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I commented to Conuly with this but...

they also rule out everyone who has had sex with someone who has commited a homosexial or bisexual act, and everyone who has had sex with them, and so forth.

They do not discriminate between protected and unprotected sex.

As such, this rules out almost everyone I was friends with in college. Almost all of my friends of friends... pretty much most of the people I know. Most people just lie. But if they didn't, most people I know would not be allowed to give blood.

[conuly]

That 10% number comes from the most scientific studies I've found.

Let's even pretend it's 1%. This is a country with some 260 million people, no? That's... um... 260,000 people. That's a huge amount of people.

2. Your personal observations are directly at odds with my personal observations. I would suggest you go to the studies on this, and then we can talk.

3. I'm sorry, has there been a large outbreak of people getting AIDS from sperm donations? I wouldn't think so, but...? Even if I agreed with the argument (which I don't), I wouldn't agree that there's a need for this sort of discriminatory rule.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I'd like to correct myself, I just checked the Red Cross web site, and I had the rules slightly off. I was eligible despite health problems, I would now be a big question mark. It'd likely depend on whether they were trying to convince people they should give blood or not. Sometimes people try to pressure you into it and wave away excuses, sometimes they feel cautious.

Also, apparently only male homosexual encounters count. Plus, having sex with a male who had a homosexual sex act only marks you as ineligible for 12 months. And having sex with someone who has been banging lots of male bisexuals isn't a problem at all, except that they are allowed to reject anyone during the interview stage.

But I was told that I was eligible to give blood shortly after September 11, when I asked about it. It was during the beginning of my mysterious illness phase and the full ramifications weren't understood yet. Personally, I think that's a good time to reject people, but I was found eligible. The only reason I didn't give blood is that they moved the blood drive to a different area where they thought they'd get more donors.

[(Anonymous)]

If you would do a little research before you opened your uneducated mouth, you would find your statement absolutely the ramblings of a predjudiced person. 1. Even if it is "only" 5% of the population... that IS huge, you moron. 2. Gays are not more promiscuous than straights, that is merely your perception, not a fact. 3. Yes, very rarely there are false positives, but with technology being what it is, the occurence of false test results are sharply declining. Also... if you will check with the cdc, you will find that there is only 1 incidence in the entire history of all reported AIDS cases that tested negative, only to develope the disease 5 years later. Keep in mind that this case was a heterosexual male, and there was no tracking his sexual excapades, therefore, who is to say that he did become infected sometime between tests? If I were to venture an educated guess, I would say that he was sleezing around with some bar ho and contracted the disease between times... Just please don't spout hate before you know what you are talking about...

[conuly]

Hey! I agree, stej was incorrect. But he's also my friend and doesn't deserve anonymous flaming. You're mad at somebody? Great. You've got three choices. You can shut up. You can create an account and sign a name to your posts. You can take the time to construct a well-written, non-inflammatory reply.

Acting like an unmannered child isn't one of the three choices.

[stejcruetekie.livejournal.com]

You know, there's really no reason for me to respond to this. It's senseless ramblings by an anonymous wimp. Certainly the other posts in this discussion were much more worthy of responses if I had ever gotten around to it.

But it's a lazy Sunday afternoon, and your post is so ridiculously easy to rip to shreds, that I think I will.

1. You call me a moron because my opinion of "huge" differs from yours. This is not a matter of fact, it is a matter of opinion. 5% of any number is not "huge" to me, in the big picture. That's my opinion, yours differs. Deal with it.

2. You state that gays are not more promiscuous than straights, it's only my perception. Well, I don't see you backing it up with any facts (other than, presumably, your own perception), so I guess we're kind of even, huh? I have been looking around at this, and haven't yet found anything that I consider citation worthy (from *either* perspective), but so far I stand with my current view and experiences.

3. According to the CDC, in 2003 alone there have been 87 cases of HIV infections through blood transfusions, blood components, or tissue. 61 females (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats/2003SurveillanceReport/table22.htm) and 26 males (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/stats/2003SurveillanceReport/table20.htm). (Look! sources!). Clearly the testing is not 100% accurate and bad blood is slipping through. Technology may be improving, but... Are you volunteering to be one of those 87 unlucky, innocent people?

And lastly, you charge me with spouting hate. Where? I don't see it anywhere. Did I write somewhere that I hate faqs and I think they should all have an orgy in a Hitler era gas "shower"?? No I did not. This issue at hand has nothing to do with homosexuality. Whether or not the governing bodies have some vast right-wing anti-gay conspiracy going on, I don't know and don't care - it has no bearing on my view that they're doing the right thing in this case.

What we are dealing with is a field of science/business known as Risk Management (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&oi=defmore&q=define:Risk+management). In a nutshell, this is looking at something, determining the various risks associated with it, how those risks can be reduced or eliminated, and at what financial, social, and manageability costs.

Seatbelts have been determined to be a reasonable risk deterrent, despite the initial cost and social inertia. Air bags have been determined to be a reasonable risk deterrent, despite their high cost. 5-point seatbelts have been determined to *not* be a reasonable risk deterrent, likely because of social inertia, even though they no doubt would save a number of additional lives. That is all part of "risk management."

In this case, homosexual males have been determined to be a very high risk group. (And frankly, when I look at the numbers, anyone who tries to claim otherwise is just flat out blind or in denial). The powers that be have decided that there is a reasonable reduction in risk by eliminating that group, at the cost of losing a certain number of safe donations from that group. Cost/benefit analysis, basic business principles.

BTW - that 87 figure I gave above? Or if we go by you, 1 in all of history - that's with these risk management procedures already in place. One would think the number would be a bit higher if we didn't have these guidelines, yes?

Have a good day.

[conuly]

See, I just told him to not flame you. You're just encouraging him.

(Mind, I still think you're wrong, but I'm not going to insult you over it.)

[stejcruetekie.livejournal.com]

Ah, but I don't think of my post as a flame - I think of it as a well written, logical post (with a few sarcastic comments thrown in for good measure).

Of course, it's probably all lost on him/her/it, if he/she/it even bothers to come back and see if there's been any responses.

[leora.livejournal.com]

The rules aren't well-based on safety. Protected sex with a bisexual or homosexual isn't a big risk, and you can test for the known risks. Meanwhile, people like me are free to give blood. They haven't found any cause for why I became extremely fatigued, went blind, and had lots of other things suddenly go wrong, so I'm perfectly allowed to give blood if my sexual and travel history allows it. Because they didn't find anything wrong with the blood that they can detect. They don't know it to be contagious. So, it's okay.

Enjoy your heterosexual blood supply. :)