I’m Going To Think About Donating Blood
New guidelines from the Food and Drug Administration could lead to more blood donations for the American Red Cross. Credit: redcross.org
In the 1980s when we first identified the disease AIDS, there was no testing and there were no drugs to treat it.
Gay men, and men who had sex with men, could not donate blood because of the high risk of HIV transmission. Gay and bisexual men in monogamous relationships had to abstain from anal sex if they wanted to donate.
Now we have testing and we have treatment. As a sign of how much has changed, the Food and Drug Administration on May 11, 2023 finalized recommendations blood donor eligibility rules based on their risk of HIV, not on their sexual orientation.
The time is right.
Over the years, it became more obvious that the restriction was really discriminatory and stigmatizing to gay men because HIV is really a sexually transmitted infection and is more of a behavioral issue as opposed to being limited to one group.
Now, all potential donors will be asked questions about their sexual activity.
Here are the questions:
Have you had sex with a new partner in the past three months?
They're going to ask all people who answer yes if they had anal sex.
If the answer is yes to that, the person is disqualified from giving blood.
And yes, women do have anal sex.
If you haven’t had anal sex for more than three months, then you’re OK to donate.
Couples who’ve had anal sex but have been monogamous for more than three months are allowed to give blood. Heterosexual men and women will be banned if they recently had anal sex with a new partner.
Someone on PrEP, either pill or injection to prevent HIV, still won’t be allowed to give blood because the medication interferes with the screening tests to determine HIV in the blood. So the screening test isn’t reliable if a person is taking HIV meds for treatment or prevention. But I think that exclusion will change over time as testing gets better.
Not being able to donate blood has been a problem, especially with a shortage of donors. So this does open it up a bit more. Maybe a lot more.
Now that this has changed, I’m going to think about whether I will become a blood donor. In the past, I haven’t been able to because I’m a gay man. Now it’s different story. And the good news is, there’s no upper age limit. So I don’t have to lie about my age.