Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

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.]