Progressives ban blood drives
If you're not with the radical agenda, you're against it.
By Neil Stevens Posted in AIDS | Anti-Science | Blood | California | HIV | Homosexuals | Liberals | Progressives | San Jose State University — Comments (85) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Blood is a constant need for those with medical emergencies or chronic problems, and the only way to get blood to those who need it is for people to donate their blood.
However, in order to ensure the safety of those who receive blood, there are a number of restrictions on those whose donations are accepted. Conditions that make blood medically useless include Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, leukemia, lymphoma, hepatitis, AIDS, infections, malaria, syphilis, gonorrhea, sickle cells, and tuberculosis. To give a person blood from someone who has one of these conditions could be life threatening, and so the FDA requires that organizations take a list of precautions to prevent such diseases from getting into the blood system.
Progressives at San Jose State University are banning blood drives anyway, though. They have decided that the anti-HIV precautions are unacceptable, and so would rather not give blood at all, in order to attempt to bully the FDA into compromising its scientifically-sound, safety-first blood donation protocols.
Read on...
Says MEDIANEWS about the situation:
San Jose State University's decision this week to ban blood drives on the 30,000-student campus over discrimination concerns is drawing a gush of criticism from local blood banks.
Stanford Blood Center officials said they actually agree with San Jose State President Don Kassing that the federal Food and Drug Administration is wrong to prohibit blood donations from gay men.
...Blood drives on the San Jose campus bring in an estimated 1,000 pints a year, estimates Michele Hyndman of the Stanford Blood Center. In general, she said, high school and college campuses account for about 20 percent of all donated blood.
[Michelle Hyndman of the Stanford Blood Center] argues the effects of the ban go further, however, since many students who first give blood in campus drives go on to become lifelong donors.
Lisa Bloch, spokeswoman for San Francisco-based Blood Centers of the Pacific, agreed, calling Kassing's decision "irresponsible."
Politics come before science at SJSU, and activism before community health and safety. The radical agenda of certain homosexual activists must be honored, even if it disrupts a cornerstone of "public health," which has long been a progressive buzzword.
As someone who was at risk of catching AIDS by taking blood transfusions numerous times because of five heart and bowel surgeries in 1983 and 1984 (as blood screening wasn't available until 1985), I am fully in favor of the FDA retaining lifestyle bars on blood donations.
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The article is about SJSU, not ARC, trying to bully the FDA.
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Admittedly its a conjoined probability that there is an error in the test and the donor has aids. Thats still enough to cause a fairly regular procession of people infected by transfusion.
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Are there that many people who self-identify as gay but have had no sex in 30 years? If you've never had sex, why not tell the blood collection center that, rather than that if you ever did, it would probably be with the same sex?
At the point of lifelong celibacy, self-identification is kind of meaningless, isn't it?
Don't get me wrong -- I'm for the lifelong ban on people who have ever been actively gay, for the sake of erring on the side of caution. If they ever relaxed it, and Person One got sick from blood, the Red Cross would be sued out of existence. But if someone has never had a gay experience, in what practical sense is he gay?
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Banning gay people from giving blood simply because they are gay is ridiculous. Anyone who isn't stuck in the 1980s knows that gay people aren't anymore likely to have AIDS than strait people. And in fact that the vast majority of people in the world that have AIDS are in fact strait.
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Yes, but then you may as well say that the vast majority of people in the world that have testicular cancer are men. There are vastly more straight people in the world than homosexuals, so in absolute numbers you're right. In relative terms though, I believe you are still statistically more likely (certainly in the developed world) to have AIDs if you are gay.
Even the American Red Cross obviously acknowledges that by their desire to maintain a ban on blood donations from men who have had sex with another man at any point in the last year, while acknowleding that after that point they are just as effective in terms of screening for blood disease through other methods.
1. You don't have to be stuck in the 1980s. You just have to keep up with AIDS stats to know that AIDS has a higher prevalence in the gay population. At least the CDC says so regularly in its updates.
2. You don't have a right to give blood. I have a lifetime ban on donating blood because I was stationed in Germany in the 1980s. The concept is called "risk factors."
3. You can't import blood so your last point might be of some validity is subsaharan Africa but not so much in the US.
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling
WE are talking the USA. Gays are in fact the source of most infection and the epidemic was introduced here, according to widely accepted and well documented history, by Gay men having irresponsible casual sex.
But you get extra points for dissembling.
The only question that matters is should the lords of SJSU have the power to simply impose their rules on science?
You should try Google some time. It produces amazing results, like real information.
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/basic.htm
By far (4x), the source of AIDS in males is homosexual contact.
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The radical Gay community was/is responsible for a self inflicted plague, mainly amongst gay males, from the US outbreak of this disease. Tens of thousands have died needlessly as a result and few if any of the radicals will acknowledge the cost of 'defending their livestyle' over public health.
The rational precautions then were "gay bashing" and "homophobia" back then and still are today in the twisted view of these nihilists.
Certain behaviors are high risk and those who engaged in them are exposing themselves to diseases => SOME of which are FATAL !! It would follow to a rational person that those individuals are not good candidiates to donate blood.
If you do not like the consequences avoid those behaviors.... .
I know, individual responsibility is heresy to the Left .
"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
my family always donates blood and hopefully it courses through a liberal and turns them conservative ;-)
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we could all enjoy equality. Wouldn't that just be nirvana.
"I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." - The last recorded words of Adam Smith.
"Blue Blood" for Blue Staters and Progressives who don't want to deprive gays, IV drug abusers and prostitutes (and their clients) of their God-given right to share the consequences of their lifestyle choices with everyone. Guaranteed 95-97% safe, or thereabouts.
"Red Blood" for Red Staters, rednecks and Republican knuckle-draggers, using pretty much the rules that are in place today.
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"I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." - The last recorded words of Adam Smith.
If we are using the CDC stats and accordingly banning gay males because they make up a majority of new cases we should also ban African-Americans and males as a whole? Whats that you say? That doesn't make sense? You're right. It doesn't.
Gay men are more at risk for HIV due to the way the disease spread in the U.S. In sub-Saharan Africa it spread as at heterosexual disease first and thats its primary mode there.
Banning gay males lifetime makes no scientific sense.
“The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal -- they have to live off each other--while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.” --- Will Rogers
It also makes no sense to lose out on a thousand pints of donated blood over squabbling.
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IV drug users ? Lifetime ban acceptable or not ?
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My child and I have both been recipients of donated blood in the last decade. I have no desire to have high-risk populations donating to the blood supply. Too bad if their feelings are hurt.
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Gay men are more at risk for HIV due to the way the disease spread in the U.S. In sub-Saharan Africa it spread as at heterosexual disease first and thats its primary mode there.
The HIV virus spreads in the heterosexual population in Africa, but hardly at all in the U.S. Hmmm.
Some people think that it's not even the same disease.
Maybe they're crackpots, but I'm not willing to bet my life on it. Are you?
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa
Between the regions. Its primarily a cultural issue. I would favor classifying people that participated in the heterosexual high risk acts as another high risk group but the effect would be nobody would admit to the acts if asked.
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Or, for that matter, that HIV does not exist. (Wikipedia write-up on this set of ideas.)
There are some hideously bad ideas out and about.
As a medic in Viet Nam in 1965-1966 I got milaria and dengue
from "picking up the pieces" after a fire fight. I could not
donate blood because the tests would show syphilis. Anyway,
years later I could bank my own blood before a prostate
removal. Good thing because I needed two pints and I had
three in the bank. We don't always have this chance but
blood is good and has been ten years.
“The difference between a Republican and a Democrat is the Democrat is a cannibal -- they have to live off each other--while the Republicans, why, they live off the Democrats.” --- Will Rogers
He's referring to illegal IV drug users.
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It makes you look silly when you forget, because your comment loses all context and can make no sense at all.
thank you,
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The insinuation that all gay men have the exact same behavior is ridiculous. The insinuation that all gay men live in the exact same way is ludicrous.
But, I understand the way fear works, and it isn't like my community goes out of its way to act responsibly. The entire culture is mired in implication of sexual proclivity that is, quite frankly, counter culture bullcrap. The nature of it is beginning to change, but somehow convention maintains, and it leads to misunderstanding and idiocy.
Those of us who were not whores, who understood what was happening, and who chose to follow more traditional methods of relationship parity will just have to suffer. It's not our fault, but we still have to bear the stigma. However, To pretend as if the stigma has no merit is both ridiculous, ludicrous - and judging by the younger gay generations dismissal of HIV risk - dangerous.
It's a fact that certain behaviors are an HIV risk factor. This policy of the FDA's isn't based on prejudice or fear. It's based on actual, scientific research into the situation.
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In order for there to be a risk, one of the people actually has to be infected. So, the certain behaviors which you speak, between two monogamous HIV negative people, does not produce risk.
Right, but it is not, and should not be made to be, the job of the blood bank to certify both a prospective donor as well as his gay partner monogamous. They have to take an actuarial approach, because it's all they can properly do.
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So, rather than an all-out ban, any actively homosexual man who wants to give blood must provide contact information for all of his partners for the last 30 years. The Red Cross must contact every one of them and test them for diseases. If they all come out clear, the first guy can give blood.
I think a ban is a better idea :)
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Think about the numbers. The tests have an error rate of one in 200 and every 2 seconds there is a transfusion in this country.
Thats 50K transfusions a day or 250 errors a day. Just how many false positives are tolerable ? Gay advocacy groups win this battle and they own those people that have been given an incurable disease.
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Think about the numbers. The tests have an error rate of one in 200 and every 2 seconds there is a transfusion in this country.
And what is the error rate on a questionaire that asks people about their sex lives when 1. people can lie and 2. the relationship between the answers and the information you actually want is strained?
The answer is that there are two error rates for the questionaire. First is the false negative that it will miss more than 50% of the people infected with HIV and the second is the false positive that it will reject the large majority of gay people who do not have HIV. When this was the only test available it was worth using despite the huge error rate. But it is not much of a test on which to hang your hopes of personal safety.
The test is not perfect. The question should be is the test better than any other screening process available.
The FDA can (and perhaps should) continue to use multiple screening techniques. Given the quality of the blood test then a further screening which performs a little better than random - as the lifestyle questionaire does - should further reduce the risks of false negatives. But, do try to recall that nearly all the work is being done by the test with 0.5% error rate, not the one with the - what? 10% error rate?
That needs to be set against the risk of false positives. The lifestyle questionaire has an enormous false positive rate. How concerning that is depends on whether or not there is a shortage of blood. If there is, it's much more dangerous than a slightly elevated risk of contamination.
Just put it in personal terms. If you need a transfusion and the choice is blood that is 99.5% likely to be safe and blood that is 99.9% likely to be safe, easy choice, right? But if the choice is blood that is 99.5% likely to be safe and no blood, and therefore death, well, that's an easy choice, too, huh?
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
Lose a pint of blood vs infect someone with Aids ?
The downside of false positives is minimal
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
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That's what I said below.
But if there is a shortage of blood, false positives are more dangerous than false negatives.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
Let gay men donate blood that will only be used on other gay men. If the recipient is so certain that there is nothing to fear, then he will have no problem accepting that blood.
I'm not willing to take that bet. But then again, I really wouldn't want blood from someone of any of the other high risk factors that are still allowed to donate either.
Like what? Who is high risk and allowed to donate?
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No. He suggested that there were people so designated that were still being allowed to donate. I wanted to know what groups he was referring to.
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African Americans.
More illness. Even though blacks (including African Americans) account for about 13% of the US population, they account for about half (49%) of the people who get HIV and AIDS.
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Well, perhaps. But since the gay/hiv risk factors are isolated by the current rules, adding blacks across the board would only trap people who are specifically NOT in the portion of their population that causes that statistic.
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But since the gay/hiv risk factors are isolated by the current rules, adding blacks across the board would only trap people who are specifically NOT in the portion of their population that causes that statistic.
That's the only way this statement makes any sense. If that is what you are arguing, do you have a source for this?
There's a lot of genetic factors that make people more or less likely to be infected by any pathogen. We don't know what those factors are at this point. It is entirely possible that the African American community is simply more susceptible to infection by HIV. It wouldn't be the only disease that has a racial bias.
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It wasn't me saying it. The person I replied to said "they account for about half (49%) of the people who get HIV and AIDS", and I was assuming it arguendo.
It seems to me that, if it's true, and if you're already filtering for HIV risk behaviors, it would trap more blacks by percentage, I suppose. But since current rules already trap the ones this concerns, why filter the REST of them that are NOT hits under the current testing? That would be like filtering all males, because more AIDS patients are male than female. Assuming that's true... no I haven't checked. But the reasoning would be just as flawed.
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"Put your faith in God. I know *I'm* going to..."
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This is disgusting.
Banning specific people from donating blood is a GOOD thing. It maintains a lower risk of contamination from potential infections.
And for the record, I too am banned from giving blood. My stigma? I had jaundice after a severely broken bone.
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I think whoever's protesting is claiming you can maintain the same low risk of contamination but increase the donor base by changing the parameters of the test (ie: to exclude those who've had homosexual conduct in the past year rather than 30 years). That is obviously the optimal outcome.
I'm banned because I am anemic.
I am also a major drain on the local blood bank because I need transfusions on occasion. In 2005 I received seven units at one sitting.
The CDC should take every possible precaution to keep the blood supply clean.
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Amen, brother...
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I've been to the outbacks of Honduras recently. But banned only for a few years.
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Test it twice if you have to. Lifestyle questions are completely unreliable as a method to screen. Are we really depending on someone being honest about their sex life or illegal drug use to ensure the safety of the blood supply? I sure hope not.
As someone else mentioned, if we really wanted to carry this policy out to its logical conclusion, we should also be discriminating against blood donations from black males since they are substantially more likely to be HIV infected than the general population. We don't do that because of the outrage it would generate. The policy as it is today makes no sense.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
"We don't do that because of the outrage it would generate."
Uh, no -- we don't do that because, as I said, given the current gay/drug/hiv screening, it would only trap additional people specifically NOT responsible for that statistic.
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"Put your faith in God. I know *I'm* going to..."
-Taniwha
We have no idea why prevalence of HIV is so high in the black community. We don't know all the genetic attributes that affect the likelihood of HIV transmission. We are still trying to figure out how circumcision affects HIV transmission, and is far simpler. If you know everything there is to know about HIV susceptibility and transmission, you should really write an article for a medical journal. You would probably get a Nobel prize.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Well, it seems to me that, if blacks are at higher statistical HIV risk (which factors include IV drug use, after all), it is more likely for socio-economic reasons than genetic ones. I could be wrong, I suppose, but it would take pretty dramatic proof to convince me that it's for genetic reasons that blacks take more IV drugs than other groups. The proposition that they are genetically more suceptible to the HIV virus itself would similarly require convincing proof. The proposition that 'more blacks are gay', ditto.
Don't get me wrong; any or all of them may be true for all I know; But you'd have to show me, because I don't think it adds up.
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"Put your faith in God. I know *I'm* going to..."
-Taniwha
That says a higher prevalence of IV drug use accounts for the higher prevalence of HIV in the black community? Should we be basing our blood screening policy on assumptions like this? You're the one that wants to use lifestyle screening. Screening on race also has the advantage that people have a much harder time lying about it. I say we don't depend on lifestyle screening at all.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Look -- if you support screening by race because as an advocate for no screening for lifestyle, you assume it would result in high outrage and the subsequent throwing out of lifestyle tests as well, have a ball. I don't think it will happen, though, for the logical reasons I outlined. Lifestyle tests make sense based on what we currently know, flawed as it may be. Racial testing, again, based on what we currently know, does not.
If that changes, I'm sure a case for it will be made. Political correctness is one thing. The safety of the blood supply is another thing again.
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"Put your faith in God. I know *I'm* going to..."
-Taniwha
It is just stupid to try to screen based on questions that require honesty about things people are very seldom completely honest about, when there are other screens that don't require any honesty at all.
I don't think either is necessary. We have a good test with an extremely low false-negative rate and we use it to test donations. The questions we ask about lifestyle are about as effective as the questions we asked for 20+ years about terrorists asking you to carry a bomb onto the plane for them. We don't ask those questions any more yet, surprisingly, people aren't being duped into carrying on explosives for terrorists.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
But it should be a matter of science, not your prejudices.
What makes you think screening by race would not appreciably reduce the risks?
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
Refusing to collect blood at all would reduce the risks of infusing contaminated blood to zero. Why not do that, then? I thought the point of this discussion was to find ways to MAXIMIZE safe donation, not further limit it. It seems more like YOUR purpose is to suggest something you think would be politically objectionable so as to create enough emotional smoke to get people to ALSO foolishly discard, in the resultant confusion, other rules that make a lot more sense.
But to directly answer your question, which in truth I had already answered, I'm sure that if a good reason is proposed to screen all blacks across the board, rather than just the ones that engage in the same behaviors that currently get whites banned as well, those who suggest it will get to make their case. And if it makes as much obvious sense as banning IV drug users and practitioners of certain high abrasion sexual acts, then I'm sure it will be duly considered.
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"Put your faith in God. I know *I'm* going to..."
-Taniwha
I'll stop point out the logical inconsistencies in your arguments if you stop blatantly making up stuff about me.
My purpose, as you must know if you have the reading comprehension anywhere above nine, is to reject the political classifications completely - both the University of San José's and yours. It is to balance risks sensibly.
Your purpose seems to be entirely political. You want some group's banned if there is minimal risk and other groups not banned even if the risk is greater. You refuse to engage in any discussion about risk factors associated with African Americans but are quite happy to see blood from gay people turned away without considering the comparative level of risks.
You see the difference? I am suggesting that people should be guided by science whereas to you it's all about politics. Please stop projecting your prejudices onto me. It's offensive. I am not like you and I don't want to be.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
1) Due to fractionation and pooling, one infected donor could in turn affect perhaps hundreds of recipients. This raises the stakes for maintaining a clean blood supply
2) Reliance on the honesty (or memory) of the donor is an unnecessary risk to take. Malicious infections by HIV carriers via sexual contact are know to have occurred.
3) All screening tests intrinsically have a certain false negative rate. I don't know the accuracy figures for blood screening, but very few screening test have a FN rate lower than 1:200. That's not a good number for a relatively prevalent fatal disease like HIV infection.
4) Public confidence in the blood supply is vital and a case of contamination will shake that confidence and may result in draconian overreaction.
5) The liability/tort climate puts blood banks, etc. in the position of needing to err on the side of safety.
According to this. That is far less than 1:200. 1:200 would be 0.5%.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
Checking a number of references for ELISA finds sensitivities in the 99.15% to 99.9% range. Since, FN = (1 - sensitivity), this translates to an FN range of 1:1000 to 8.5:1000. Thus my "seat-of-the-pants" 5:1000 figure looks to be in the right ballpark, anyway.
Thus I suspect Wiki mixed up percentage and fraction. The number they probably were referring to was 0.003 which corresponds to 0.3%.
The other caveat is that these figures are derives for a "low-risk" population, which a priori eliminates gay men as donors. Adding a higher risk group could only raise the false-negative rate.
At this point we leave strict science to decide what is an acceptible risk. However, the decision to exclude gay men is not an irrational bias, but rather a decision not to futher increase risk.
Genealogical DNA sampling shows that, for the population, there is about a 2% rate of "no match" between father & son in the same family.
In other words, one in 50 of us has a father other the "public" one, the one shown on our birth certificate.
That's a documentable rate of infidelity in the heterosexual population, probably one that understates the true rate of infidelity.
Now, I'm not normally a betting man, but I'd be willing to bet that there's a rate at least that high among supposedly "monogamous" gay couples.
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa
Yeah... I had once heard that 14% of men in marriages with kids are raising a child that they think is theirs, but which isn't.
It sure would be fascinating, if true.
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"Put your faith in God. I know *I'm* going to..."
-Taniwha
for using an acupuncturist. There are no risk factors, as acupuncturists don't reuse needles and don't in any case puncture blood vessels. (Even reused acupuncture needles would be a much lower risk than reused hypodermics).
The question of whether people should be banned ought to be one of science and statistics. I fear that too many people on this thread have fallen into exactly the same trap as the politically correct by advocating lifetime bans for gay sex and even in one case a ban for any illegal behaviour.
The question should be what are the risk factors. When there were no blood tests the risk factors for anyone who has had gay (male to male) sex since 1977 were too high to be tolerable. Now they are a tiny fraction of what they were, but still measurable. Any fool can see that a three week window is much smaller than 30 years.
Given the tiny risk that now exists, should the ban be maintained? The appropriate comparison is not with other groups banned or unbanned from donating blood. Maybe other bans should be lifted. Maybe new ones should be imposed. The appropriate comparison is with the risk of not allowing these donations. If there is plenty of blood for transfusion, then the risks of a cautious banning policy are minimal. But if there is a subtantial shortage the risks of turning away blood are extremely high.
The factors to weigh are purely mathematical. There is a real and measurable cost to allowing even one pint of infected blood into the blood bank. But there is also a cost in turning away 1,000 pints of healthy blood which patients need to survive.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
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I'm sure the FDA policy turns away a whole lot more than 1k pints a year in donations.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
If there is plenty of blood, then an ultra-cautious screening policy makes sense.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
If policy requires refusing donations from people based on a lifestyle questionaire that gets you inferior results to an accepted test of the blood it is going to lead to turning away plenty of healthy blood.
Any rationally cautious test will involve refusing more healthy blood than unhealthy. This is fine. It makes perfect sense. The question is how much more is tolerable. The answer depends on how much blood you have available for transfusion.
The answer will therefore vary with a range of factors: new medical tests; availability of blood; even blood type. It can be quite rational to turn away people with minimal risk if they are A+ but accept people with the same risk factors who are AB- or O-.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
The FDA needs to assess (and periodically reassess) its policies in the light of all the relevant information. Whether or not it is politically correct to ban particular groups is not one of the relevant issues.
SJSU seems to taking a stand on the wrong issue for the wrong reasons.
The American Red Cross is on much firmer ground for its criticism of the FDA. If the science has changed (and plainly it has) then maybe the policy should change.
Quentin Langley
Editor of http://www.quentinlangley.net
International Editor of
I couldn't believe that very last bit, so I clicked the story...
From the article: "The rise of AIDS in the 1980s prompted the FDA to prohibit donations from men who had sex with men any time after 1977. These days, groups such as the American Red Cross say that lifetime prohibition is excessive, since modern blood testing will catch any diseases contracted more than three weeks before the donation... They've lobbied for years for officials to relax the restriction on blood donation to one year after the latest sexual activity, but to no avail."
So, The American Red Cross isn't in favor of an outright ban, but agrees that the lifestyle exclusion component (applied to everyone) is necessary in order to reduce the possibility of new exposures slipping through.
You last sentence is therefore incorrect as I though. The only thing the university is arguing with is the outright PERMANENT ban on gay donors even if they haven't had sexual activity for 30 years and thus no risk factors at all. They are certainly not arguing that the lifestyle test be dropped completely.