[sub]Syphilis.[/sub]
The ironic part is that my first and only boyfriend donated blood at the same time I did - he STILL gets people calling, begging him to donate.
Fine! I’ll take my sperm to someone who appreciates it. :mad:
boom chicka wow wow
Seriously though… The blood donation thing is absolutely stupid. For one thing, they don’t define sex. For another thing, what everyone else said about how I could have lost my virginity ten years ago with another virgin and had no sex since then, and I’d be unable to donate blood whereas some dude who banged a hooker April before last, could.
The amusing thing, of course, is that I’m a registered bone marrow and organ donor. Apparently marrow (which registry is run by the blood agency) and organs do not transmit Teh Gay.
(I also love the bit about “Have you ever received drugs or money for sex?” Apparently, HIV is transmitted via money. And what about the drugs part? Do the four mai tais he bought you while trying to get into your pants count?)
Hey, matt_mcl, out of curiosity, how does marrow and organ donation work in Canada? The reason I ask, one of the studies I found on the Net relating to HIV’s ability to survive cold temperatures used bone marrow as the tissue being tested.
I’m an organ donor, myself, but it’s not a terribly strenuous process here in the States to sign up. I don’t recall any health-related questions, although it’s been literally years and I could be forgetting.
At least in Quebec, as I mentioned, marrow donation is run by Hema-Quebec (the provincial blood service – the rest of Canada has another blood service). At some point I was offered the opportunity to sign up, so I trotted down to their office and underwent blood tests.
The questionnaire had the same questions as for blood donations, but it said that you could leave out questions, so I did, and I expected that they would reject my application or at least ask me further questions at a later date. They didn’t; instead, every year or so I get a little notice thanking me for my participation and assuring me I’m on the list.
Organ donation is not complex - you just check off on the back of your medicare card and make sure your next of kin know of your wishes. (My mother is a doctor, so you can see where that goes.) There are no health questions at all, which is weird to me – if I’m brain dead and they need my heart and kidneys stat, will they really have time to make sure I’m not contagious?
Damn! Well, I can kiss my hope of THAT goodbye.
Thanks, mhendo! My hero!
I’m not recommending the quarantine for killing the virus. It’s to allow time to elapse for follow-up testing on the donor himself. I don’t want any sperm to be used for DI that is not accompanied by an initial and a follow-up test at of the donor at least 3 or 6 months after the sample is obtained (whatever the incubation period for HIV tests is currently).
More dangerous than what? Right now, there about 75,000 women have DI’s performed a year in the US alone. As I said in my previous post, there is possibly one case of HIV transmission documented after HIV testing became available. I can’t even find if testing was performed on that sample. And I say possibly, because other sources suggest that there hasn’t been a single case.
I don’t get this argument. Lives are not at risk if we ban DI altogether either. That would be really safe!
Sauron, I’ll come back to the rest of your post later. I’m getting really frustrated with my inability to find much reliable info at all on DI, and I need to go entertain my own fully-biological offspring. 
I work for the national marrow donor registry of the United States, the NMDP.
I can assure you that if you are ever found to be a match for a patient needing a bone marrow transplant, a sample of your blood will be tested for a host of diseases that can be transmitted via bone marrow, including HIV. This is true in Canada, in the States, and in every country that operates a national registry of volunteer bone marrow donors.
I don’t know why the Canadian registry allows people to decline answering questions (as you noted in a later post) as you sign up to be considered as a marrow donor, but if you ever end up matching a patient and the patient’s doctors begin to seriously consider you to BE THE ONE TO DONATE, you can and will be excluded if you test positive for one or more of the nasty infectious diseases in your blood. (They test your blood, BTW, not your marrow – if the nasties are in your blood, they are in your marrow.)
All right, it’s a good thing that work today involves lots of waiting around for things to happen, because it looks like I’m STILL not managing to get through clearly.
I’ll take this step by step, so that it’ll be easier to see where the disconnect is.
Having m/m sex, having sex with someone who has had m/m sex, having sex with heroin-shooting hookers, and being raped all put one at extra risk for contracting HIV. The Red Cross asks rape victims, parters of those who have had m/m sex, and people who have sex with heroin-shooting hookers (hereinafter pwhswhsh 
) to wait twelve months after the last incidence of that before donating again.
The 12-month wait increases the chance that an infected donor will discover that he or she has HIV and not attempt to donate. It also provides sufficient time between the last high-risk event and the testing of the blood for the tests to become effective, as they’re generally not capable of detecting the disease immediately after infection.
After 12 months, the Red Cross considers rape victims, female partners of men who’ve had m/m sex, and pwhswhsh to be safe to donate blood again, as it is presumed that any HIV infections from those cases would either be detected in testing or discovered beforehand through other means.
Now, hypothetical time!
Say you bring together four types of people - women who were raped twelve months ago, women who had sex with a bisexual guy twelve months ago, men who had sex with a heroin-shooting hooker twelve months ago, and men who had sex with another man between 1977 and (let’s say) 1985, but not since then. Let’s say the other HIV risk factors among them are not significant, and that if they were infected, it happened at the time of the lask high-risk incident and not more recently from something considered low-risk.
Now, say you ask them to separate into two groups - people who know they have HIV in one room, people who aren’t sure or know they don’t in another. The people in the non-HIV room are people who would try to donate blood. The people in the HIV room are people who wouldn’t, because they already know they have it.
So, you take everyone in the non-HIV room and give them HIV tests to see if they’re right about their negative status. You’ll probably turn up some who were infected from their high risk events and didn’t know it. Which group would you expect to contain the most people who are unknowingly infected - men who did something very risky twenty years ago… or people who did something less risky, but did it only ONE year ago?
Now, let’s say that you can go one beyond the Red Cross, because you have some sort of special MAGIC HIV test. It can detect HIV in ALL cases. Ever. No matter what. Even when the virus hasn’t been in the system long enough for the regular tests to detect. Because it’s MAGIC, dammit. You run this test on everyone who passed the last one. Anyone who comes up positive on the magic test represents a failure of the Red Cross to keep HIV out of the blood supply, which is the thing that all of these rules and tests are supposed to PREVENT. Again, would you expect more to come from the gay guys who haven’t gotten laid since 1985, or from the other groups?
Anybody still think letting men who had sex with men twenty years ago donate is more dangerous to the blood supply than letting men who had sex with heroin-shooting hookers one year ago donate? Because if you do, then I’m going to have to come back. And next time, I’ll make VENN DIAGRAMS! :eek: :eek: :eek:
Gotcha. But in some (possibly rare) cases, it may take longer than six months for HIV to show up in a test.
More dangerous than it has to be. Why take more risk than is necessary?
Help me through this, because I’m really not understanding the argument. On the one hand, we have a group of people who want to donate sperm anonymously. (Note, again, that it’s anonymous donation that’s the issue here; directed donations are still perfectly fine.) This group is statistically more likely to carry a potentially fatal disease for which there is no completely accurate test, and for which there is no cure. How is preventing them from donating anonymously somehow showing “hatred” toward them?
No worries. I’m enjoying the conversations.
So your issue is with the accuracy of HIV tests? Do we have any stats on that?
I think that if I believed HIV tests weren’t sufficiently accurate, I wouldn’t be accepting bodily fluids fron anonymous people, no matter WHO they were.
Well, let’s take a look. The American Red Cross collected approximately 15 million pints of blood in the U.S. in 2001. Each unit of blood is typically separated into four components, so that’s 60 million units of blood products. (Cite.) Note that the ARC isn’t the only organization that collects blood.
Let’s say the HIV tests are 99.999 percent accurate. That means it’s possible 600 blood products were used in 2001 that were contaminated with HIV. (Note: The actual number would be statistically much smaller in this example, but I’m talking hypothetically here.)
Is the system foolproof? Of course not. It’s as foolproof as we can feasibly make it at this point, but it’s not 100 percent.
For non-emergency surgery, many doctors will recommend patients give blood autologously – donating your own blood ahead of time to be used in your surgery if it’s needed. That would be the route I would take, if I could. Sure, there’s a miniscule chance that donor blood received in surgery would infect me with HIV or another disease – but it has happened before, so as remote as the possibility is, it IS still a possibility. As I said, why take more chances than are absolutely necessary when it comes to your own health?
elfbabe: I have no proof, but I suspect the ARC (and other organizations) are using the lack of a completely accurate test as a way to avoid lawsuits regarding the 1977 date. If they have that date qualifier on the form, they can argue they did everything they reasonably could to screen their donor base. If they arbitrarily change the date to some later year (say, 1985), a person infected with HIV via a transfusion could argue in court that the ARC did not do everything in their power to screen the donor base, because it’s just possible the donor fell into the eight-year window offered by the ARC via the date change.
I see what you mean, but that’s exceedingly unlikely. The non-accurate tests are not likely to fall 100% to people who ARE infected.
I don’t have time this second, but I plan to look up some statistics on the ability of HIV tests to detect HIV. This is actually not ‘accuracy’ - you and I both know that tests can be inaccurate the other way around
I keep mine for other guys only. 
When you factor in the safety precautions, testing, and the demographics of gay and non-gay men who actually make it to be donors, I’d like a realistic look at what the difference in risk is. Say for an entirely hypothetical example that the difference in risk of acquiring HIV between a gay and a non-gay donor is something like 1 in 500,000 versus 1 in 1,000,000. Well, if having a gay donor is important to me for other reasons (maybe I’m a lesbian, maybe I don’t like the idea of the donor having his own biological family, maybe this guy who happens to be gay is perfect because he’s the same unusual ethnic group as my immigrant husband…), then I might be willing to accept this risk which is doubled but still very very small.
First of all, just want to point out that I don’t think I personally have used the word “hatred” which you have in quotes. That said…
Why I think we may be in disagreement here is that I am not just looking at the group of people who want to donate sperm, but the group of people who want to receive sperm. For the recipeints, donor sperm is not an interchangeable unit like blood. The process of choosing a donor can be very complicated. Some recipeints read essays, do photo matching, look at baby pictures, life history, SAT scores – all kinds of things until they find someone they feel comfortable choosing. For a portion of the population, that may be a gay male. I would have to hear some really darn good justification demonstrating that other, more specific screening tools would not be nearly or equally as effective in order to justify having the government step in and disqualify an entire group of people based on who they are, not what risky behaviors they’ve actually done.
One. More. Time.
ARC and other organizations have the rules they do because the FDA says so. Violating FDA regs means fines. ARC is tired of paying those fines and follows the rules. It had nothing to do with lawsuits. It’s the FDA that says it must be so.
No, not you … the OP. I don’t think this restriction is based on “hatred,” or anything of the sort. I think it’s based on solid statistical analysis. Based on the information at hand, not only are gay men much more likely to carry HIV, they’re also very likely to be unaware they even have it (or at least, that was the conclusion of the CDC three years ago … it’s possible that’s changed since then). The CDC studied blood samples of 40,000 high-risk individuals – in other words, drug users, prostitutes, people with multiple partners – and the incidence of HIV was NINE TIMES higher in gay men than in any other high-risk group. The incidence of other sexually transmitted diseases in some urban areas (such as New York and San Francisco) was also going up exponentially, and the CDC attributed that increase primarily (although not exclusively) to gay men.
I will freely admit my ignorance here, but how can recipients do some of the background checking you’re talking about for anonymous donors? I understand profiles are used for sperm donors, but I honestly don’t know how detailed they are (and I suspect the detail may vary from sperm bank to sperm bank). I would think that, in order to preserve anonymity, some of the stuff you’re talking about (such as photos and life histories) would be inadmissable. If I’m wrong on this, I’ll be happy to recant.
LaurAnge, my quick searches Friday showed that the two tests for HIV, when used in tandem, tend to be approximately 99 percent accurate. There may be a deviation of a fraction of a percentage point on either side of that – I was trying to be overly optimistic in my estimate of the tests’ efficiency.
chique, my bad – I knew it was the FDA that set the guidelines for blood donation. However, I’m fairly certain the ARC has been sued in the past for providing contaminated blood, and that’s what I was referring to.
OK, thanks for the clarification.
Photo matching is done by employees – you submit the photo to them, and they do the matching. As for the rest of the info, this page from California Cryobank (one of the major sperm banks) provides an example about what kind of detail can be involved for an “anonymous” donor. If you want to read a sample long profile for a sperm donor, there’s one here (warning: it’s pdf and 26 pages long, and doesn’t even include the essays). Obviously, the detail will vary by sperm bank and by individual donor, but California Cryobank is pretty well respected. As you can see, “anonymous” donor is a bit of a misnomer.
Basically, given the amount of detail that they collect and testing they perform, it’s hard for me to believe that such a blunt-edged weapon as a gay/no-gay test is fundamentally necessary or even the best choice.
This may sound like a “pretty even split” until you consider that the US population is nowhere near 44% homosexual men. With no correlation, you’d expect the population of HIV-positive people to demographically represent the larger population. It doesn’t.
Imagine you have a population of 1 million men, and 10000 (1%) of them are gay. 100 of them come down with a terminal disease. If half of the diagnosed people are gay, then there’s something significant going on.