I've seen the math in another discussion in another forum, and it's actually sensible to turn away gay people. From their point of view the goal is to get as many blood donations as possible, while minimizing the risk of disease. They couldn't give a f*ck about anything else.
Couldn't find all the numbers I was looking for, but it turns out 61% of infections in US are through male-to-male sexual contact. This probably translates into over 60% of HIV carriers being male and gay.
Now, if I was a guy in a position to decide things, and I could reduce by more then half the risk of HIV in transfused blood by reducing the donation pool by 7-10%... I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If you have some time you could try to calculate how many more people would get HIV if gay people would donate blood. You could subtract the people who wouldn't die because of the increase blood supply. But the result would still be positive.
The point of the whole blood donation thing is not to be politically correct, but to solve a problem. Making it politically correct, in this particular case, would mean solving the problem worse, possibly significantly worse then if we just let them do their jobs.
I think you both imagine that transfusions are 1 on 1. (1 donor, 1 recipient). In this case, the numbers you present kind-of work out. And sure, a risk of HIV (or whatever) infection versus certain death is worth it in any scenario. (Especially now that HIV/AIDS is chronic and treatable rather than terminal).
Many scenarios involve heavy blood loss and require more than what is normally given by a donor in a single donation. This means drawing on the pool of available blood, so multiple donations will be used of the same type, but they won't be from the same donor.
This raises the risk of transfusing infected blood significantly which is one of the reasons that the screening for blood donation harshly excludes anyone who fits in one or more higher risk groups.
I'm a donor and where I live you can't donate blood if you've received blood (inter-species tissue exchange), lived in UK in the 90s (mad cow disease risk), were born in sub-Saharan Africa (HIV risk) and a couple of others. This includes ever having had male/male sex (very high risk group). Ever been paid for sex? Out. Ever exchanged drugs for sex? Out. The list goes on and on.
The 'in the last 12 months' items are again a form of risk management (they include new partners, tattoos, piercings, infections, illness, surgery, travel to risk countries, etc).
All blood gets tested and though false negatives are still possible, most infections are statistically close enough to 100% detectable after 6 months.
Where I live it's also illegal to sell parts of your body (which includes your blood). The idea behind that is that legalizing this would create a predatory market between people with money and those on the bottom rung of the ladder (poor, addicted, high-risk, all of the above). That's not a hard sell, but it also acts as a filter in the blood donation system. People who are most likely to sell blood are the people you don't want giving blood in the first place.
A detail in my country is that the donation forms don't ask about your sexual orientation, which is irrelevant. If you identify as homosexual (male/male or female/female) but have never had male/male sex, you're good to go.
Blood donation is a region where you're just harshly subjected to selection based on statistics which place you in one risk group or another. Discrimination doesn't factor into it.
Actually, it does. Recent test results aren't useful with HIV; it can remain undetectable for months.
It's a question of perspective. You might be certain enough of your and your partner's fidelity over the last year to bet a stranger's life on it. But they aren't confident enough in a stranger's assertion of marital fidelity to bet their patient's life on it.
The problem isn't with the fact that they turn down gay men. The problem is that they turn down gay men while accepting people who have regularly exposed themselves to HIV, as long as they haven't done that within the past 12 months.
In case you haven't seen it, mpk has a response[1] which brings up a point I've never seen made before:
> All blood gets tested and though false negatives are still possible, most infections are statistically close enough to 100% detectable after 6 months.
This kind makes irrelevant all the outrage over them accepting blood from donors who have had wildly unsafe sex over 12 months ago. At this point it's only a matter of risk management surrounding the possibility of recent infection. You may say that in that case, it shouldn't matter if you had a same-gender sexual encounter 30 years ago, but this really just boils down to statistics, and having a same-gender sexual encounter puts you in an entirely different statistical category than people who restrict themselves to strictly heterosexual encounters.
You seem to be saying, in essence: allowing gays to donate doubles the number of instances of transfusing HIV while only increasing the number of lives saved by 7-10% (or 20%, or 2% - it doesn't matter). But that's the wrong way to look at it. Even if 10% of all transfusions from gays resulted in an additional HIV infection (thanks to testing etc., I'd guess it'd be well below 1%), that still means that, for any given transfusion candidate, you have a 90% possibility of saving their life without transfusing HIV.
The problem is that the percentages are higher than that. The biggest problem is that testing won't always pick up HIV and AIDS, because these diseases can lie "dormant" for quite a while, but yet they are still in the blood (undetectable) and will cause infections somewhere down the line.
Actually, excluding 7-10% from the pool may not mean any lives lost. It will just decrease the available blood supply, which can be compensated through many other means.
Excluding certain categories is a simple and effective administrative solutions - and doesn't really make any sense to confuse it with anything else.
Couldn't find all the numbers I was looking for, but it turns out 61% of infections in US are through male-to-male sexual contact. This probably translates into over 60% of HIV carriers being male and gay.
Now, if I was a guy in a position to decide things, and I could reduce by more then half the risk of HIV in transfused blood by reducing the donation pool by 7-10%... I'd do it in a heartbeat.
If you have some time you could try to calculate how many more people would get HIV if gay people would donate blood. You could subtract the people who wouldn't die because of the increase blood supply. But the result would still be positive.
The point of the whole blood donation thing is not to be politically correct, but to solve a problem. Making it politically correct, in this particular case, would mean solving the problem worse, possibly significantly worse then if we just let them do their jobs.