Bi/Gay men are forbidden from giving blood in Australia. Why?

The other odd one is "had any body piercing (except ear piercing) in the last 12 months ". Why are ear piercings exempt? You can get them done by a bimbo at the chemists, whereas things like nose/facial piercings are usually done at a professional place with medical like conditions.

??

Oh wait, wrong joke.

It's true here in the States too.

Yeah, ear piercings aren't exempt from the regulations on other types of piercings the U.S. blood banks have. I do know our local blood bank has loosened up on its restrictions herein recently; it will now allow you to donate blood only a month after any body piercing(s), so long as the facility you obtained the piercing(s) from are accredited by the state of TX. This regulation still prevents someone who might've gone to a dodgier place and might've suffered the consequences, from contaminating the local blood supply.

The IV drug thing is put in a slightly different way locally; they specifically mention that the ban is only on those who inject illegal substances. Surely if you need to take specific medications intravenously, you wouldn't be as nearly at risk for developing HIV/AIDS (if you didn't have it already, that is) as those who inject illegal substances would be.

AND you have to be 110 lbs.!

Um, yeah, like duh... that's to prevent anyone not hearty enough to be able to tolerate donating a pint of blood from actually donating. If someone weigh less than 110 lbs, that person's a really thin person, right? Unless he or she is, like, 4 feet tall and is about ten years old or so, in which case that person wouldn't fall under the age guidelines for donating blood, so, yeah.

1) HIV hasn't been a "gay disease" for years, and

2) they test all the blood they get anyway.

The Finnish roof organisation for gay/lesbian/bi/trans/etc. folks has protested this practice for years, but if it indeed is a global Red Cross policy, it might be hard to change. I wonder if anyone has questioned The International Red Cross about the issue - probably.

This is the question. Apparently they do not test all the blood. They can't. A statistical sampling is tested; it would be far too expensive to test every pint for every disease vector. Given this, statistical analysis must be employed to "protect" the supply. Which explains the HIV issue caution.

In the industrialized western world (may exlude Russia based on recent reports) two groups are statistically more likely to have been infected: IV drug users and gay men. Other populations are statistically unlikely to have the virus. This doesn't negate trends like HIV growing faster among women than any other group, or the like. Growing rapidly from a small base is a vastly different thing from constituting the vast majority of cases of a disease.

Similarly, if you've never been to England (but you kind of like the music), it is a statistical impossiblity that you can have BSE. 15 cases outside of the U.K. in a population of 5 billion doesn't register.

This idea that everyone has a right to give blood "because I'm safer than most heterosexuals" is politics, not science. Not that politics doesn't enter into science, of course. It's akin to thinking that HIV should by rights be distributed evenly across all populations. That would be fair. Hmmmm. Fair ain't the issue. Time and money is the issue. Give more money, and blood, to the Red Cross. Then maybe they could test all of it.

Blood crisis!

That said, the demographic group reporting the most rapid increase in HIV infection in the U.S. is younger women. :(

They include

- 'have you had acupuncture, ear piercing, body piercing, tattooing or semi-permanent make-up in the last 6 months?'

- are you a man who has had oral or anal sex with another man (even if you used a condom)?'

- 'have you ever received payment for sex with money or drugs'?

- 'have you had sex in the last 12 months with a man who has had oral or anal sex with another man?'

Answering 'yes' to either of the gay sex questions seems to rule you out straight away. So apparently even *protected* gay sex is not ok.

Would dinner count? hahahah I mean, wtf is that for a question.

yes, it does.

re. testing: i doubt they test blood, it's an expensive procedure and not simple (if you actually get tested for hiv you needs something like 3 tests over a few months, etc etc). so yes, they do their statistical duty.

(and gay men are excluded too)

This is an outrage. I heart my keyring. I quite like people knowing my type is A+ - think of how useful THAT is.

Going by this chart, in the US through 2002, almost half (out of 312,133; 134,357 male-to-male and 17,758 male-to-male + needles for a total of 152,115, or 48.7%) of new AIDS cases occured in gay men.

Taking data from this page http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/demographics.html we can see that recent studies found no more than 6% of US men identified themselves as gay. We'll round that up to 10% on behalf of those who just aren't admitting it.

Now, if 10% of the population had 48.7% of the AIDS in a country, it would make sense that the blood of a homosexual male has a higher chance of being contaminated.

To dismiss them all at once is wrong, as somebody earlier mentioned that a gay man practicing safe sex is being put lower than a hetero who might engage in risky behavior. If we were to dismiss an entire popuation offhand, it might as well be African Americans, who through 2002, accounted for 162,950 (or 52.2% of all) cases while being 12.3%* of the population.

* http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

however as pointed out it can take three to six months for the HIV virus to express itself. so testing alone isn't sufficent. gay men are statistically more likely to have come in contact with the virus than other populations. its all done purely to protect patients, thats all.

Read my above post. Blacks are statistically as likely to have come into contact with it as gay men, but they are not barred from donating. This is a matter of either discriminating against gays, or being too PC to discriminate against blacks.