I have grown up surrounded by diversity, and I have seen homosexual men continually treated as second class citizens in the United States. However, out of all the rights that have been stripped from them, I believe that the ban on their blood donations is by far the craziest and most outdated.
The Food and Drug administration says that it won’t allow men who have sex with other men, known as the MSM group, to donate blood because of the possibility that homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered individuals are more likely to be infected with HIV and Hepatitis B. The sad truth is that anyone can contract HIV or Hepatitis B through origins other than blood transfusions.
Africa, for example, has the highest percentage of AIDS-infected people. In South Africa, there are more than 5.6 million people living with AIDS. Most South Africans are infected through unprotected heterosexual sex, or inherit it from birth or breast feeding. So an MSM who uses condoms every time he has sex and has tested negative for HIV can’t give blood, but a straight man who hasn’t taken HIV test and may have had unprotected sex can? This is clearly discrimination.
The FDA states that tests performed on donated blood can detect HIV, but they aren’t 100 percent accurate. So the FDA cannot risk accepting blood from an MSM, because a person who has been infected with HIV will not get a positive test result until two weeks after infection. However, African Americans account for 44 perfect of those infected with HIV in the United States. Yet, the FDA and The Center for Disease Control aren’t prohibiting them from donating blood because it would be considered discrimination and there would be a huge outcry against it.
If the accuracy of the test is the real issue, perhaps it should be mandatory to require potential blood donors to show proof of having an HIV test within the proper time frame before they try to donate blood. This would do more to guarantee the safety of the blood supply than to continue to exclude MSM from donating blood because of an unfounded possibility. The fact that an HIV test isn’t a requirement already is very scary.
The policy of not allowing homosexuals to donate blood because they are supposedly more likely to donate contaminated blood is based on fear and discrimination. This outdated rule prevents many hospital patients from receiving the blood they so desperately need. This is America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, yet 200 years after this great nation’s birth we are still not holding true to the saying “All men are created equal”.
Allowing MSM to donate blood won’t fix all the mistreatment or eradicate the prejudices against them, but it would be a very good start. It would confirm that we are basing crucial, national medical decisions on science, instead of disrespect and ignorance.
