Even if you grant all that … if the intent is to exclude people who engage in particular risky practices, why not ask about that instead of a proxy measure? There are many men who have sex with men who never have anal sex.

I agree with them in some ways, hence my autologous deposit. I much prefer my own blood back than taking any chances with some random strangers.

I am a U.S. president who wants to start a war. The international community is against it, but they are just blindly applying oversimplified rules (like “No wars”). I understand what they want and need better than they do, and I am sure they would agree with me if they knew the facts as well as I do.

It is ethical, in this case, to force the war upon them (lying about the circumstances if necessary)—right?

(Overblown analogy? Yes. Identical logic? Yes.)

Anyone heard anything new on this subject?

I’ve donated over 40 times and have never been rejected despite a beef-ridden diet (they don’t ask)

CJD has led to a ban on people who’ve received blood themselves here from donating after a donor who unknowingly had the disease caused recipients to develop it.Apart from that and the tiny number of people who actually have the disease,it’s had no effect on U.K. donations.

2-3 years ago a visit to the U.S. in the preceding 12 months was enough to get you rejected (can’t remember what the concern was but it seemingly passed as although you have to say where you’ve travelled to in the last 12 months the U.S. is off the ‘no’list at the moment afaik.)

I’ve never lied and wouldn’t do so,believing the doctors know better than I what’s an acceptable risk.They accepted my blood on one occasion when I ticked ‘yes’to medicine in the last 7 days and I also recall a young colleague succeeding in pressing them to let her donate even though she had a heart condition.So I would say be honest and keep trying to donate unless or until you’re clearly ruled out.

Every screening test has a sensitivity – an ability to detect the disease when it is truly present – and a specificity – an ability to be confident that a positive result is a detection of true disease. These are ratios, usually expressed as percentages, and they are properties of the test in question.

The ideal test has a 100% sensitivity and a 100% specificity. No ideal tests exist. All tests now in use have sensitivities and specificities below 100%. Think about that for a minute. That means that, given enough units of blood tested, some HIV+ blood and some hepatitis B and C positive blood is going to get through, even if everyone does something right.

How much? Well, that depends on the “Predictive value positive” and “predictive value negative” (PvP and PvN). If the test comes up negative, how likely is it that the blood is truly clean? These numbers have to do with, not only the properties of the test itself, but also the population prevalence of the disease in question. That is, if there are 1/3 infected units in the Red Cross blood supply before the tests are done, the predictive value negative is much lower – worse – than if there are only 1/3000 infected units before the tests are done. Another way, a statistical way, of referring to the population prevalence is the “pre-test probability” that the blood is clean.

To reduce the amount of tainted blood that gets through and condemns some poor unwitting recipient to a slow, horrible death by AIDS, the docs want to reduce the pre-test probability that the blood is tainted.

Population studies show that excluding MSMs reduces the pre-test probability considerably. That’s not homophobia, that’s statistics.

Also, we know that MSMs have a higher rate of Hep C, of Hep B, of HIV+. That’s because of practices they do (penetrative anal sex) that have a high risk of transmitting those diseases.

But in 1983, we didn’t even know that HIV existed. About 50% of America’s hemophiliacs contracted HIV and AIDS from transfusions they’d received before we even knew that HIV existed! So did thousands, maybe tens of thousands of other people.

This is the great catastrophe of which we docs are trying to avoid a repeat performance.

Isn’t there a better and less ethically dubious way to address perceived inefficiencies at the Red Cross? Think up of a different screening process that gives the Red Cross clear efficiency gains and makes a case to them.

The point isn’t that they accepted your blood before, but that they are unwilling to accept it now. As the link provided by Aidan (#4) states, many unfortunate victims were given HIV+ and AIDS infected blood through transfusions with blood from Red Cross donations before they even thought to ask questions about it.

Perhaps the Red Cross will change their screening questionaire in the future. Nevertheless, would you want to receive blood products knowing that people were lying on their screening questionaire, not opting out anonymously, and that there is no 100% perfect blood contamination test?

The HIV screening questions seem to have made a lot more sense in the mid-80’s than in the late 00’s, but perhaps such a blunt approach is still required to maintain confidence among the general public.

For the record, I have sort-of-lied on my form for giving blood. Since I have been tested on numerous occasions for the thing they are clearly trying to winkle out in that particular question and found to be negative, I don’t personally have a problem with it.

One thing I’d like to point out, and maybe it’s been said before, is that you’re presuming to know better than the Red Cross. It’s possible that their questions are exactly what they want them to be. In other words it’s possible that your assumption “The policy is designed for official simplicity: if the person who devised the policy had the power to make exceptions and heard (and believed) my story, they’d make an exception in my case.” is false. Do you have any evidence for that assumption? Also, do you know if answering yes to the question immediately disqualifies your blood? Many of the Red Cross questions have follow-up questions associated with them.

The other similar but distinct issue is that the Red Cross has decided to concern itself with handling blood supply. If it is willing to reject your blood even if you are perfectly healthy, in exchange for greater surety of the safety of the blood supply, then you are working against it by lying, even if you are perfectly healthy.

Finally, I will try to nullify your argument completely by giving you a self-interest in blood donation. The human body produces too many red blood cells, in anticipation of blood loss. Women have a steady method of losing blood that men do not and over time the risk of heart disease in men is higher because of the consistently elevated amount of iron in their blood. Giving blood regularly, therefore, could reduce your risk of heart disease. I cannot cite studies to back up this claim, so the value to you may be very small, once you attenuate it by all the uncertainties, but in any case the resulting benefit will be non-zero. Unless you don’t value reducing the risk of heart disease, I guess.