My ex couldn’t give blood and told me it was that Africa question.
Afterwards I saw her questionaire and she had ignored the Africa question but had been turned down for too many partners.
Your butt looks huge in those pants.
Couldn’t resist.
For that matter, the infection rate/deaths from/believed undiagnosed infections among young African-American males dwarfs that of white males. Why not reject them as a matter of course “just to be safe”?
I think I speak for most gay males who are irked by this when I say it’s not that I’m not allowed to donate blood but the fact that others who are a greater risk are, and I’m neither uninformed or in denial of any kind when I say that I KNOW my blood is safe and (according to the Red Cross people who call and email me, in spite of my asking to be removed from their lists) it’s needed.
Of course my ex-doctor also insisted that I take an HIV/AIDS test when he learned I was gay even though I assured him
1- I’ve been extremely safe
2- I’ve had several tests in the past whenever I had bloodwork done, all negative
3- I haven’t even tried to “get lucky” with anybody since well before my last test as it’s been an eventful busy year (which is really a shame since I’ve got really good looking and defined chest and arms and legs [and even a one-and-a-half-pack abs] for the first time in forever)
4- I have had nothing even remotely resembling the symptoms of HIV-AIDS
5- He did not ask me one question about my sex life and only knew I was gay because he asked since I’m 40 and single
but again the whole “gay=AIDS risk” thing.
I will admit Gay=HIV/AIDS risk is a raw nerve with many gay men, myself included, and I know intellectually that it’s not intended as such. I also know that there really is a lot of stupidity in the gay community just as there is with the straight community and there really are people who don’t think they’re at risk for AIDS who are.
In the late 1980s in Alabama, when I first began going to gay clubs, I remained comically overly protective with my only “sort of like sex” partner (meaning we did nothing that involved even tangential exposure to each other’s bodily fluids and I’ll leave it at that). AIDS was still a big mystery as to how it could and couldn’t be transmitted (sex of course, blood transfusion, but what about French kissing? Toilet seats? Drinking after some-one? General rule of thumb: why take chances?). At that time I was so appalled at the stupidity of the ones I knew: guys who were promiscuous, got a negative HIV test, and so they thought it was okay to become promiscuous again, or (and there were more of these than you could believe) the closet cases, some of them husbands and fathers, who would not seek treatment or get tested because they didn’t consider themselves gay and therefore their sex life was safe, because fags got AIDS and I’m not a fag, I’m a heterosexual who likes to have sex with men self-loathing self-deluding philosophy. So I understand the general “no one since 1977” thing. But I still don’t like being quarantined when others who are infinitely more risky arent’.
Out of curiosity, does the Red Cross still buy blood? Because there are many who wouldn’t think twice of selling blood regardless of their status.
I don’t think some of you understand how hard it is to ask questions that will allow the people collecting the blood to distinguish between donors who are more likely to have infected blood and those who are less likely to have it. The questions have to be a small set and they have to be yes-or-no questions. Anything else would have so many potential donors walking out that they couldn’t get enough blood. I suspect that the absolute maximum amount of time that the questions could take, even for the first donation, would be two minutes.
I had a chance to see how much people hate long questionaires about their health this week. At work everyone working within a certain set of buildings got a E-mail questionaire about their possible physical reactions to the environmental factors in the buildings. This questionaire took a long time to fill out, perhaps fifteen to thirty minutes. Some of the questions were the sort that most people would generally only discuss with a doctor. It appeared to me that most people hated the questionaire, despite the fact that the time answering it counted as work time and none of the questions were the really personal (and somewhat taboo) things that are asked on the blood donation form.
I think that as it is the questions asked about a person’s health and habits on the blood donation form are just barely within the range of what most people are willing to answer. I think, for instance, that it’s only within the past thirty years that a question like “Have you ever had sex with a man?” (for a man) would have any chance of getting honest answers. If this question had appeared on such a questionaire sixty years ago, hardly any men would have have honestly answered it “yes” and probably many people would have walked out when they saw the question on the form.
What question could distinguish between hetrosexuals who have had sex with lots of other people and those who haven’t. If they asked “Are you promiscuous?”, the answer from most people would be either, “How dare you ask such a question?” or “How many sexual partners makes one promiscuous?” Do you think that giving a specific number would work? How many people would honestly answer such a question? I suspect that it would be very hard at least to come up with additional questions for the blood donation form that wouldn’t cause too many people to walk out but would make it less likely that someone would donate infected blood.
Well you know what pisses me off? I psych myself all up to give blood, and go eat like 3 double cheeseburgers, resist a severe urge to puke everywhere, put on my heaviest pair of boots, and I get to the place, and I still don’t bloody well weigh enough! They still gave my a biscuit though, so that was nice. And now I’ve had sex with boys, so even if I was heavy enough, I wouldn’t be able to. It just makes me sad when they put those ads on TV and have those blood drives at work and stuff and I don’t get to go with everyone else and get a little stuffed monkey 
The weight requirement is for your safety, you know. Having that much blood drained out of you puts some stress on the body. Take a unit of blood from a smaller person, and you’re removed a bigger percentage of their entire blood supply than if it had been a bigger person. They don’t want their donors to be putting themselves at risk, which is why they have the weight requirement, the hemoglobin requirement, and ask you questions about blood pressure and such.
Yeah, I know. But it still makes me sad.
Because, as stated many times before, the goal is not simply to maximize safety. Rather, the objective is to maximize safety without seriously compromising the amount of blood donated.
Some of you seem to think that if the Red Cross asks some questions that are designed to screen out potentially hazardous donors, they are obligated to ask all such questions. That simply isn’t the case. As Wendell Wagner said just now (and as I alluded to in an earlier post), there comes a point at which the interview process becomes unwieldy and impractical. That’s why only certain questions are used, and these questions are designed to produce what they Red Cross believes to be an optimal balance between quantity and safety.
Hey, my mom got that from - the cough syrup. Which happens to be 70% ethanol, d’uh! So whenever she had that cough syrup, she was having the equivalent of 3 spoonfuls of vodka a day :smack:
While she never was as big a donor as Dad (who made the gold medal) or myself (haven’t been able to donate for years, combo of bad veins and traveling a lot), it’s yet another example of always erring on the side of caution that makes me wonder whether they don’t overdo it.
I’ve got a very mild case of a medical condition that makes my red cells smaller than usual, therefore my “sedimentation velocity” higher than usual (my hemogoblin is normal, it just comes in smaller “bags”). This is something that doesn’t even get analyzed any more, because they finally realized its variation between individuals is so large that you just can’t use it as a pointer for infection, like they used to. I still was getting barred from donating blood because of it about 5 years after they started using it as a blood test - they only tested it in potential donors!