FDA ends lifetime ban on gay men donating blood

[Hurem 17,801]

The ignorance tho

[pink sushi 4,351]

This is so stupid. Don't they TEST all the blood anyway??

And there's no way of knowing when the last time someone had sex was. So people can easily just lie.....

[DontDoubtDavid 1,196]

Yay! Don't have to lie anymore. I like donating blood, I always hated that restriction.

[ItsTommyBitch 12,640]

4 hours ago, pink sushi said:

This is so stupid. Don't they TEST all the blood anyway??

And there's no way of knowing when the last time someone had sex was. So people can easily just lie.....

Yes, they test the blood, the only problem is that HIV infected blood can come back false-negative and then become positive (im not sure about positive-negative sans personal errors in testing...). It used to be quite a long wait period for this to be confirmed (several months between tests and results to be declared with finality if i remember correctly), but technology has come a long way... specialists in HIV clinics claim that blood can definitively be determined to be HIV positive or negative within a couple of weeks, but no one wants to talk about that  They also say that lifetime bans on sex workers and people who have used non prescription aren't as justified as they sound, but i havent done research on why they believe this...

If the concern is about the delay between accurate testing and the time of infection, all people who engage in **** sex should be restricted to this ban, but as far as I know they aren't, so what is the truth here

 

Of course people lie  Most gay people I know don't donate anyway (regardless of if they are sexually active or not or in the closet, etc) out of sentimental/silent protest, but they certainly COULD. I'm sure people who have sex with sex workers (or have in the past) do it as well, as well as women who have sex with men who have had sex with men, along with both men and women that have **** sex.

I'd like to assume some people are more responsible than that, but these restrictions aren't as in your face all the time, and even when asked on donor forms people will still lie sometimes  

~~~~

At the end of the day, I don't consider donating blood a civil right necessarily, so discrimination on some grounds makes some sense in theory (in the line of thinking that some people can't donate blood for the sake of others) but we can be more nuanced than the FDA wants to be.

I just think its a shame that discrimination has in the past (and in some forms still today) helped to actively LIMIT the amount of blood donated that could be used to save lives. Even if it's not a massive amount its ridiculous  

[DrewStevens 5,249]

11 hours ago, Didymus said:

"In late 2013, The Food and Drug Administration approved two new direct acting antiviral drugs, Sofosbuvir (Sovaldi™) and Simeprevir (Olysio™) to treat chronic HCV infection. [...] Clinical trials have shown that these new medications achieve SVR in 80%-95% of patients after 12-24 weeks of treatment."

(http://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/hcv/hcvfaq.htm#section4)

Also curious:

"Approximately 15%–25% of persons clear the virus from their bodies without treatment and do not develop chronic infection; the reasons for this are not well known."

Wikipedia also uses the term "cured" in relation to it, so that's the best I can do to back up what I heard with what I find online.

Chronic Hepatitis C is not curable and it's usually the stage where most people find they have hepatitis C. Also it always depends of the type of Hepatitis C you have. You are "cured" when the tests don't find the virus in your body but just like HIV it doesn't mean it's not there and it can come back. 

Anyway the point of my post was not to prove how bad is to have Hepatitis C because it obviously is, the point was that HIV is not such a terrible thing anymore like it used to be years ago. It's still bad and everyone should try to prevent getting infected all the time. And I agree that reducing the impact of it is better than making people feel better about their situation but it's a sensitive topic and we should be careful to not feed the fear and stigma around HIV and AIDS