[QUOTE=Malacandra]
Strike one. I didn’t say I was in favour of the policy. I said your hissy-fit response was inappropriate. We can argue the “political prejudice that has no valid scientific backing” if you like - my understanding is that MWHSWM are a statistically higher-risk group and that, not political prejudice, dictates the policy.
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And this is why I have mixed feelings. People talk about how they’re not skanks, and how they practice safe sex - and a lot of us do; odds of me catching HIV are probably way lower than the general population, given that I don’t have all that much sex and practice safer sex when I do. But even so, on an aggregate basis, MSMs are more likely to have HIV than straight men. Asking for a more detailed sexual history might frighten off donors, or it might encourage more people to lie. It’s impossible for me to guess, but it’s possible that trying for a more “rational” approach might hurt either the safety of the blood supply or the quantity of donations. And it’s important to remember than even NAT testing isn’t perfect; my understanding is that people still occasionally get infected with HIV from the blood supply. If the questions they ask are able to remove a substantial number of HIV positive people from the blood donation pool proportional to the number of clean donations they’re using, then it may be a rational step.
On the other hand, I don’t have the numbers, and a lot of these things are seriously hard to quantify. And homophobia is still rampant in this society; it’s a tad foolish (or perhaps it’s the sign of an ideologue) to imagine that it couldn’t possibly have been part of the motivation for the decision. Judging by the FDA committee’s vote, it’s hardly an issue that’s crystal clear.
It may well be, statistically speaking, a perfectly rational decision. Or it may not be. I don’t have enough information to evaluate it, and the FDA has something of a history of late of acting on a political basis rather than a scientific one.
