Donate blood and fight homophobia
Tomorrow’s blood drive, and the “I Donated” stickers that will proliferate on students’ T-shirts across campus, mark an honorable occasion. Blood banks are as vital as they are under-resourced, and the University is right to give blood drives its full-throated support.
Moreover, the University’s contribution to the blood supply is exemplary. Through an innovative model of day-long, multi-site drives that demand cooperation between blood banks, our Community Service Office has vastly increased blood donations over the past three years. The result is that tens of thousands of lives have been saved.
But no blood drive in America is perfect, as any gay man can attest. Since 1983, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has prohibited blood donations from any man who has had sexual contact with a man one or more times since 1977. This policy is wrongful and discriminatory.
The policy was enacted at the height of the American AIDS panic. Outwardly, it was intended as a safeguard against contamination of the blood supply from HIV, which disproportionately affects men who have sex with men. In reality, however, it was and is an example of homophobia on an institutional level.
The FDA policy is prejudiced because it treats men who have sex with men as a high-risk group for HIV instead of people, both gay and straight, who have high-risk sex.
The discriminatory nature of this policy is most apparent in another FDA policy that permits men and women who have had sexual contact with an opposite-sex HIV-positive partner to donate blood one year after the contact. While heterosexuals who engage in high-risk sex get out of jail free, men who have sex with men, whether high-risk or not, face a lifetime ban.
The FDA should revise its ban in accordance with recommendations made in 2006 by the American Association of Blood Banks, America’s Blood Centers and the American Red Cross. These groups advise that men who have sex with men should be deferred from donating blood for the same amount of time as heterosexuals who are identified as at risk, and this approach is both sensible and just.
The University should continue its blood drives but take more action to end the FDA policy. In the short term, the Community Service Office should distribute notices to all blood donors explaining both the University’s commitment to blood donation and its condemnation of discrimination against gay people.
In the long term, University members should get tested for HIV in accordance with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) 2006 recommendation that all Americans take an HIV test. The best way to end AIDS-related discrimination is to end AIDS, and to achieve this, HIV testing is crucial.
Finally, University members should continue to donate blood and feel good about it, but donors should also be conscious that their ability to give is a privilege that is unjustly denied to others. Students who wish to express solidarity with their gay peers might consider donning equality buttons alongside their stickers professing “I Donated.”
Interesting how homophobia is such a concern when a responsible corporation can be accused of it based on questionable grounds, but how it becomes at best a footnote when dealing with governmental regulation of a non-military variety. If anything, the gay blood ban is more offensive than what happened with Target, and is what should be subject to student boycott.
I wrote as much last week: http://calebposner.com/2010/09/09/hypocrisy-thy-name-is-washu/
I do think it is time to re-evaluate the policy, given that we have much more effective HIV testing than we did in 1983, and given that women who have had sex with women are deferred for only one year as well.
And if this editorial was written in response to students who were considering boycotting the blood drive because of the male-to-male intercourse policy, well this editorial is much-needed and those students who would boycott are putting their ideals over a life-saving and selfless act.
However I take issue with your assertion that the policy banning men who have had sex with men “was and is an example of homophobia on an institutional level”. That the policy developed at a time when there was a great deal of panic about HIV was partially driven by a lack of knowledge about the disease – we didn’t know whether it was a type of pneumonia or a kind of cancer that attacked white blood cells. We didn’t know how it was transmitted although it was prevalent among gays, IV drug users, hemophiliacs and people from Haiti.
And we certainly no way to test for it in 1983. The technique upon which current HIV testing for blood donations is based – ELISA – was not even developed until 1985, and initially it took several weeks for test results to come back. This is not sufficient for blood donations, as whole blood is often needed immediately.
It was not until 2005 that a rapid HIV test was developed and tested that yielded a high degree of confidence in testing results.
Given the history of developing the test, that there is neither cure nor vaccine for HIV, and that HIV/AIDS kills more than 2.5 million people each year, I think the FDA is justified in its caution, and I will not begrudge the agency for maintaing the ban, though I again think it is time to revisit the policy.
The policy should also be seen as a response to the effectiveness of HIV prevention among the gay community. According to a CDC fact sheet dated June of this year, 53% of new HIV infections occured among men who have had sex with other men. In one study of gay men in five cities, 1 in 4 was infected with HIV, and half of those were unaware of being infected.
Taking these observations into account, is the driving factor behind maintaining the blood donation ban really discriminatory, or is there sufficient science to assert a need to protect the blood supply?
Oh man this timing is too good to be true.
Hey Jill Carnaghi, how about banning blood drives on campus? I’m sure that will go over great with the alumni/ future alumni donors. Alternatively, just break all ties the University has with the FDA. Can’t be that hard.