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[redbird]

threeringedmoon pointed to a story on how few Americans are eligible to give blood by current rules. I got to poking around to find out what those rules are. The Arizona Red Cross goes into lots of detail, including that if you've had injections of radioactive materials, you must wait eight weeks to donate. There are lots of discussions of things like malarial regions and medication, and then the disconcerting one, with regard to HIV/AIDS:

Their defined risk factors include "If you are a male who has had sex, even once, with another male since 1977.…If, you have had sex with anyone who, since 1977, was born in or lived in [Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria]" and "If, in the past 12 months, you have had sex, even once, with anyone who has had AIDS or tested positive for the AIDS virus."

In other words, they're treating heterosexual intercourse more than a year ago with someone who actually has AIDS as lower risk than male-male sex 20 years ago, or than heterosexual intercourse with someone who isn't known to have AIDS but comes from Central Africa.

It would be nice to believe that they're being more careful at the actual donation centers: the chance of having HIV cannot be higher for a randomly selected Cameroonian than for someone who has AIDS. I'll see what, if anything, they say to my email.

Addendum: The New York Blood Center seems a bit saner: their exclusions include anyone who has had a positive HIV test, or anyone who has had sex with such a person. They still have the "sex with a man since 1977" clause, but not "sex with someone who has lived in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria", at least according to the Web page. And one that I strongly suspect was handed to them by a state government: there's a 12-month deferral for tattoos in New York, and no deferral at all in New Jersey. This is in large red letters. [Their list of what does and doesn't cause deferral is incredibly detailed, including Fifth Disease, World Trade Center Cough, smallpox vaccine exposure, Hanson's disease, and schizophrenia--"accept if donor is legally and mentally competent." That one makes sense.]

Comments

[elusis.livejournal.com]

I've refused to donate for a long, long time because of this.

Not that I'm eligible. I keep having sex with men who've had sex with men. I keep getting tattoos (at scrupulously clean shops with artists certified in sterilization and hygiene procedures, unlike Claire's where its teenage ear-piercers use the same gun over and over again). And the next time I visit the UK for longer than about a week, I'll be banned for life thanks to cumulative time spent there.

I tried to get the graduate student GLBTQ org at Syracuse to sponsor a blood drive with the purpose of getting media attention focused on all these willing, healthy donors who were being turned away, but they weren't interested.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

On a beading web forum I frequent, one of the woman was going to get her granddaughter's ears pierced for her birthday and wanted to know where to go. I suggested she find a good clean tattoo/piercing parlor with up-to-date licenses but everybody else said Claire's, so that's where she went. I explained that tattoo/piercing parlors have laws to follow and Claire's doesn't, but she decided it was too awful to take her grandkid to the parlor.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Yeah, heaven forbid. Christ.

I just haven't even got anything smart to say to this.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I've refused to donate for a long, long time because of this.

Yes, me too, since they first started saying that women who had slept with women couldn't donate. How ridiculous.