Fight to allow gay blood donors

Bottle_of_Smoke

MYOB wrote: »

Actually, to prevent accusations of not being able to provide any information, I'm going to do it anyway.

The IBTS currently ban men who have one sexual encounter with another man from donating blood for life. This is despite the testing window for HIV being as low as 12 days (http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/ANSWERS/2001/ANS01103.html - US govt. source).

It doesn't provide any seperation between oral sex - during which both partners are at a lower risk of infection than during heterosexual sex; and anal sex, where the penetrative partner is at a lower risk than the receptive partner in heterosexual sex. If they classify the risk of transmission in any single incident of oral sex as being too high, they should be barring any woman who's ever had penetrative sex too, due to the 10 to 20 times higher risk this holds... yet they don't. (transmission figures from http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5402a1.htm#tab1 - US govt. source again).

Listen, that's well and good but when they say they're higher risk methods they're talking about with an infected partner. Statistics show those infected are more likely to be homosexual. So even if a woman performs oral, there's a 90% chance its on a straight man. Whereas if a guy performs oral, there's a 99.9% chance its on a gay man, & probably previously active, who's more likely to be infected. Out of the 250ish people infected in ireland in 06 around 20% were homosexual men. Though only 5% of the general population are homosexual men, how do you explain that? Also bear in mind 50% of the infected were sub-saharan African immigrants.(another high risk group you don't hear whining about their "right" to donate blood)

The 1980s assumption that men who have sex with men have significantly more partners has been shown to be untrue with over 70% having had only one partner in the last year in an ESRI survey (http://www.esri.ie/UserFiles/publications/20061016131112/BKMNEXT084_Main%20Report.pdf). The report helpfully doesn't provide similar figures for heterosexuals but I doubt its far off - I'll admit defeat in finding any proof of this.

The same report shows that only 17% of men who fell in to the category of having had genital sexual contact (which would mean they were barred for life from donating blood) had had anal sex in the past year. This is the sole form of contact for which there are higher rates of transmission than for heterosexuals. 68% had never done it at all. Only 30% of the men had ever been the penetrated partner - this being the only mode with a significantly higher rate of transmission than its heterosexual counterpart. About half the 30% had done it in the past year - 15%.

Even taking the very old and traditional 30 day time period since last sexual contact to elapse - lets not expect the IBTS to have top-notch screening facilities here - this would allow about 70% of all currently excluded people to donate.

The survey also shows that we're well behind Europe in levels of STI testing. I'm dropping in to hearsay/presumption mode here, but based on the fact that all of my gay friends have been tested at some stage, and only one of my straight friends have; I've a feeling that if we reached European norms on STI testing, the prevelance of HIV amongst heterosexuals would rise significantly as a percentage of overall cases...

Find some of this hard to believe, out of all of my friends who are gay only one is in a monogamous relationship, the rest are insanely promiscuous. (Though I'd probably be the same if women were as promiscuous as men.)

You're right about the testing, it is more of a gay thing to do, but I've been fully tested & so was my last girlfriend, some of my friends too. I think it's becoming a more "normal" thing to do. Still though, I don't think HIV lies as dormant as the internet makes out. When I was getting tested the doc was saying I'd have a lot of symptoms if I was infected.

Let's be honest, this whole debate is about homos being annoyed that they can't do something heteros can. You never hear of people who lived in the UK during the BSE scare complaining about not being allowed to donate.

L1011

Bottle_of_Smoke wrote: »

You never hear of people who lived in the UK during the BSE scare complaining about not being allowed to donate.

Except for one in this thread... (too many pages to find the specific post/poster right now).

As goes the ESRI report, if you find it inaccurate, you can complain to them that their sampling/testing methods are unsuitable/incorrect, but as theres no actual evidence to suggest its wrong other than hearsay it should be taken as being as correct as any other reports they do.

Rev Hellfire

Well as the old quote goes "There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics."

I don't think bottle_of_smoke is disputing the statistics given rather how they are been interpreted. Their point that the risks and statistics associated with sexually active homosexual males are accumulative is a valid one.