By John Aman
Homosexual activists, with support from the blood banking community, appear to be winning their campaign to scrap the three-decade-old FDA rule barring men who have sex with other men (MSM) from donating blood.
A Department of Health and Human Services blood safety advisory panel recommended, in a 16-2 vote last month, that the FDA abandon its current policy. In its place, the Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability urged the FDA to allow men who have sex with men to donate blood if they say they have had no sexual contact with a man for one year.
Another FDA panel, the Blood Products Advisory Committee, meets Tuesday to weigh in on the
disputed policy. The FDA has not announced when it will announce any change to the ban on blood from MSM, first implemented in 1985 after tens of thousands of blood transfusion recipients became infected from contaminated blood. The hemophiliac community was especially hard hit in the 1980s, with more than 10,000 people infected with HIV or Hepatitis C, and many dying as a result.
“Over 50 percent of the people with hemophilia were infected with HIV and 90 percent were infected with Hepatitis C,” said John Indence, vice president for marketing and communications at the National Hemophilia Foundation.
“We are completely for anything that will increase the safety of the blood supply here in the United States,” Indence said. “We just believe that it needs to be based on science and not a political decision.”
Selfish agenda
“It’s all about politics,” charges Peter LaBarbera, president of Americans for Truth, a group devoted to exposing the homosexual agenda. “It’s all about [homosexuals’] own selfish need to be affirmed in an immoral and dangerous lifestyle.”
Advocates of altering the current policy can look to a study from Australia, which found no increased risk for HIV infections resulted from a one-year deferral policy in which male blood donors must wait 12 months to give blood after having sex with a man.
Another scientific factor driving the proposed change is the advent of nucleic acid testing (NAT), a highly accurate method of detecting HIV in blood. NAT has helped reduce the HIV risk from a unit of donated blood to just one in two million.
But advanced testing methods, such as NAT, have their limitations, and do not address new blood-borne diseases that may emerge, much as HIV did in the U.S. in the late 1970s. A 2013 article in the journal Blood Transfusion asserts that a “residual risk still remains concerning pathogens for which no detection system currently exists (e.g. emerging pathogens) or which have a ‘window period,’ when blood levels of specific disease markers are too low for detection, e.g. shortly after infection. Nucleic acid testing has markedly reduced, but not completely eliminated this period.”
And science is far from the only consideration in the debate. Homosexual groups and their allies also argue that the MSM exclusion is unfair discrimination.
American Medical Association board member Dr. William Kobler labeled the lifetime deferral “discriminatory and not based on sound science” in 2013 when the AMA came out against the ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men.
Homosexual activists also claim that the supply of life-saving blood is reduced by the ban. Reversing the ban would increase the blood supply up to four percent and help save more than 1.8 million lives, according to a recent study from the pro-homosexual Williams Institute at UCLA.
But demand for blood is down, dropping eight percent between 2008 and 2010, due to medical developments such as laparoscopic surgery, use of patients’ own blood, and better patient blood management strategies. The trend will likely continue, according to Matt Granato, executive vice president of operations at America’s Blood Centers, a federation of 600 blood collection centers which provide half of America’s blood supply. He suggests that “consolidation, diversification, and supply chain integration,” may be ahead for blood providers.
Blood bankers support change
America’s Blood Centers, along with the American Red Cross and AABB, support the one-year blood donation deferral for MSM recommended by the HHS blood safety advisory panel. The three groups, which are responsible for most of the donated blood in the U.S., issued a joint statement calling the existing FDA lifetime ban “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”
“The blood banking community strongly supports the use of rational, scientifically based deferral periods that are applied fairly and consistently among blood donors who engage in similar risk activities,” declared the three groups, which have opposed the current ban since 2006.
Homosexual groups welcomed the HHS advisory panel vote, but want more.
“We certainly believe that this is a good first step in the right direction but science and common sense call for a system that screens all potential donors regardless of sexual orientation equally for their potential risk,” said Anthony Hayes, a spokesman for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which describes itself as the “nation’s leading provider of HIV/AIDS care, prevention services and advocacy.”
“Gay Men’s Health Crisis has always been against the ban,” Hayes said. “We are against the ban today. We feel that these are positive steps forward but we believe that any deferral based on sexual orientation should not exist.”
David Stacy, director of government affairs for the Human Rights Campaign, a homosexual rights advocacy group, criticized the recommendation, saying it “continues to stigmatize gay and bisexual men, preventing them from donating life-saving blood based solely on their sexual orientation.”
“The current policy, adopted in the earliest days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the new recommendation are both simply wrong and can no longer be justified in light of scientific research and updated blood screening technology,” Stacy asserted in a statement.
History of ban
The FDA’s rule excluding men who have sex with men from giving blood was first published in 1983 but not implemented until 1985 due to stiff resistance from blood bankers and homosexual groups. Some 35,000 people were infected in the interim, according to a 2006 Frontline report.
Late journalist Randy Shilts chronicles in his book, “And the Band Played On,” how inertia, disbelief, cost concerns, and civil rights rhetoric all slowed the implementation of public health measures to protect the blood supply.
By early 1983, there were reports of two possible blood transfusion-related AIDS infections, one of a baby, and three cases of apparent AIDS infections in hemophiliacs who received blood clotting factors. Despite that, blood bankers were unconvinced.
“The evidence for this is, in my view, very weak and very early,” Joseph Bove, M.D., an officer with the American Association of Blood Banks (now AABB), and chairman of the FDA’s Blood Products Advisory Committee, said at the time. “We don’t really have any proof yet that the nation’s blood supply is contaminated.”
That stance sparked a sharp reaction from CDC epidemiologist Don Francis when public health officials, blood bankers, and representatives from the homosexual community gathered in Atlanta in January 1983 to address the risk to the blood supply.
“How many people have to die?” Francis shouted at the meeting, according to Shilts.
Speaking to representatives from the American Red Cross, the American Association of Blood Banks, the National Hemophilia Foundation, the National Gay Task Force, the National Institutes of Health, and the FDA, Francis bore down: “How many deaths do you need? Give us the threshold of death that you need in order to believe that this is happening, and we’ll meet at that time and we can start doing something.”
In a 2006 interview with Frontline, Francis recalled the slow-footed response from the blood banking community. “These were supposedly nonprofit organizations for the public good who were, from CDC’s standpoint, killing people just because they didn’t want to change their procedures to eliminate people at risk of transmitting HIV/AIDS, which is really primarily gay men at that time in United States and Europe. We were shocked by this.”
Homosexual groups blocked efforts to protect the blood supply, too. They blasted proposals to screen and exclude men who have sex with other men as “scapegoating,” Shilts reported. One homosexual group said such proposals were “reminiscent of miscegenation blood laws that divided black blood from white.”
The real problem was “fast-lane guys,” Dr. Bruce Voeller, a cofounder of the National Gay Task Force, told the 1983 gathering in Atlanta. “You’ll stigmatize at the time of a major civil rights movement a whole group, only a tiny fraction of whom qualify as the problem we are here to address.”
Similar arguments are still used today.
“To have an entire group deferred simply because they sleep with gay men, that’s not a common sense or scientific way to go about screening people,” Gay Men’s Health Crisis spokesman Anthony Hayes claimed in an interview.
“Our heterosexual counterparts may engage in riskier sex than gay men but they’re still allowed to donate blood. We would want them to screen all potential donors regardless of their sexual orientation. This way we’re screening all donors equally based on risk to the blood supply.”
In a league by itself
Americans for Truth president Peter LaBarbera called it “just absurd to say that we should all be treated equally” when it comes to donating blood. Homosexual practice, he said, is “really in a league all by itself as far as risks and promiscuity go.”
Anal sex and anal-oral contact – which can include a practice known as “rimming,” in which one man inserts his tongue into the anus of another man – is highly efficient to transmit disease. “It’s almost as if sodomy was created to spread disease,” said LaBarbera.
The New England Journal of Medicine published a report in 1996 indicating that the probability of HIV infection from each act of “unprotected receptive anal intercourse” is between 1 in 125 and 1 in 31. By contrast, the probability of HIV infection from “unprotected vaginal intercourse” is between 1 in 2000 and 1 in 666.
A 2010 CDC study revealed that the rate of new HIV diagnoses was more than 44 times higher among men who have sex with other men than is the case with other men. “This first-of-its-kind CDC analysis provides a new look at the stark disparities in HIV and syphilis rates among men who have sex with men, compared with other men and women,” Dr. David Purcell told Medscape Infectious Diseases.
The FDA states on its website that “as a group, men who have sex with other men are at a higher risk for transmitting infectious diseases or HIV than are individuals in other risk categories.” It notes that the number of HIV infections among adult and adolescent males rose from 2007 through 2010 while infections linked to other risks among males declined.
The CDC reports that more than 90 percent of all new HIV infections among men ages 13-24 in 2011 were in men who have sex with other men. And the number of new HIV infections in this age group jumped 133 percent between 2002 and 2011, a rise that is especially notable since, as the FDA reports, “younger individuals are more likely to donate blood.”
Rampant promiscuity also serves to fast-track disease in the homosexual community. A Netherlands study published in the journal AIDS in 2003 reported that men who have steady partners also had eight sexual partners, on average, per year. A survey of older homosexual men published in 1997 in the Journal of Sex Research found that the “modal range for number of sexual partners ever [of homosexuals] was 101-500.”
Homosexual hookup services like Manhunt.net and the phone app Grindr facilitate liaisons. Manhunt offers “Any guy. Any time. Anywhere.” And has six million members worldwide. Human Rights Campaign co-founder Terry Bean, 66, was recently arrested in Oregon for allegedly having sex with a 15-year-old boy he and his former boyfriend located through Grindr.
Safe blood relies on trust
America’s blood donation system relies on trust and the presumption that donors will honestly respond to questions about their sexual history. That isn’t always the case. A recent FDA study found that 2.6 percent of active male blood donors are men who have sex with other men.
A married man in Missouri who had sex with other men lied on the questionnaire and gave blood in June 2008. His blood tested negative for HIV and was later given to a kidney transplant patient who became HIV-positive, the first instance of HIV-infection from donated blood since 2002.
The Missouri blood donor gave blood again in November 2008, lying once more about his HIV risk factors, but this time his blood tested positive for HIV. He later admitted having sex with other men, saying it was often anonymous and took place while he was drunk. It is not known why his blood initially tested negative for AIDS, but his infection may have been too recent to be detected by nucleic acid testing, which has a window period for detectability of up to 22 days.
One of the most interested parties, the National Hemophilia Foundation, remains unconvinced that adequate research exists to support altering the current policy excluding MSM.
“All we’re saying is that we would like to have the research done and complete so that we can say yes, this is a completely safe practice going forward,” explained Indence, vice president for marketing and communications at the NHF. “I think we all know that it is. We would just like it to be based on science and not based on a political decision.”
John Aman is a writer and communications consultant. He is the co-author of “Team Obama: All the President’s Real Men and Women” and formerly worked for one of the nation’s largest Christian broadcast ministries.
