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FDA considers revising its decades-old ban on gay, male blood donors

The Food and Drug Administration is considering making changes to a decades-old ban on male donors who have had sex with other men, regardless of their actual…

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Thirty years ago during the panic of the country’s AIDS epidemic, the Food and Drug Administration banned gay men from donating blood, regardless of whether they were HIV positive or negative. That ban is still in place, but the FDA is considering changing it. Well, sort of.

On Dec. 2, the FDA advisory committee considered lifting the ban as well as a new proposal that would allow men who identify as gay to donate blood — as long as the men haven’t had sex for a year. Regardless of health or relationship status, any sexually active gay man would still be automatically barred from giving blood. For the record, heterosexual donors are permitted to give blood regardless of sexual activity as long as they are first screened for things like malaria, viral hepatitis, HIV and syphilis. The donated blood goes through testing, too.

Last year, the American Medical Association condemned the government’s blood-ban, arguing that it was, “discriminatory and not based on sound science.” What’s more, blood banks desperately need more donations.

This past summer, the American Red Cross fell 80,000 blood donations short as the number of donors volunteering to give blood was down 8 percent. The Williams Institute, UCLA's LGBT think tank, has cited that if the FDA’s ban was lifted, gay men could raise the number of eligible donors by 2.6 million and the number of likely donations by 615,300 pints per year. The one-year celibacy rule would add an estimated 317,000 blood pints yearly.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s guidelines for organ donations run along the same lines — any man who has had sex with a man in the past five years is excluded from donating tissue and organ. Earlier this year, an otherwise healthy Pennsylvania man, Rohn Neugebauer, died unexpectedly of a heart attack and was rejected as an organ donor because he was gay.

Neugebauer had devoted much of his life to fundraising for the Center for Organ Recovery and Education.

 
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