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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration opened the door on Tuesday to a change in its blood donor deferral recommendations, which currently prohibit donations from gay men for a year following their last sexual encounter in order to reduce the risk of transmitting HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In December the FDA overturned a 30-year ban on all blood donations from men who have sex with men, saying the change was based on science showing an indefinite ban was not necessary to prevent transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus. The FDA is now signaling it may go further.

Antibiotic-resistant cases of the sexually transmitted illness gonorrhea have more than quadrupled in the United States. This new data, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, should serve as a warning that "the future of current treatment options may be in jeopardy," the agency said in a news release issued Thursday. "The confluence of emerging drug resistance and very limited alternative options for treatment creates a perfect storm for future gonorrhea treatment failure in the U.S.," said Dr. Jonathan Mermin, who directs the CDC's National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention.

... Blood supply experts say the FDA will need to determine whether the move to a one-year waiting period for gay and bisexual men made the blood supply less, more or just as safe. That effort will take several years, and only then would the agency be able to consider relaxing its restrictions further, said Brian Custer, who has led a number of studies on the nation's blood supply and is associate director of the Blood Systems Research Institute (BSRI) in San Francisco. Removing the waiting period altogether would also likely require a large-scale study that tested blood samples of...

A Merrill Lynch analyst ate a handful of magic mushrooms in his Manhattan apartment Sunday morning - and then plunged to his death out of his 26th floor window. Alex Lagowitz, 23, was found dead on a third floor, outdoor patio around 10 a.m. - directly below his bedroom window at Windsor Court on East 31st Street and Lexington Avenue in Murray Hill. It’s still unclear if he purposely jumped or lost his balance and fell out of the window.

ICONIC musician Prince was diagnosed with AIDS just weeks before his death, according to reports in the US. An industry source interviewed by The National Enquirer messaged friends on April 19 to share that the singer was suffering from the disease. It is said the singer was 'preparing to die' for weeks and the source claimed 'he was in bad shape'. “Doctors told Prince his blood count was unusually low and that his body temperature had dropped dangerously below the normal 98.6 degrees to 94 degrees. “He was totally iron-deficient, very weak and often disoriented. "He rarely ate and when...

Rates of gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease, are rising sharply in California, especially among gay and bisexual men, according to new state health data. The gonorrhea rate among California men aged 15 to 44 shot up 54 percent between 2011 and 2014, according to recently released data from the California Department of Public Health. Among women in the same age group, it rose 35 percent. An average of 34,000 gonorrhea cases among 15-to-44 year-olds was reported in California each year between 2012 and 2014, most of them among men. By contrast, the national gonorrhea rate, calculated slightly differently than California’s,...

Shortly after 6 p.m. Sunday, a bunch of motorheads temporarily seized control of the California's busiest bridge, blocking off traffic in order to turn the span into their own personal playground. Related Stories Small dog captured after CHP chase on Bay Bridge Average San Francisco commuter spent more than three days in traffic last year And so far, they have gotten away with it. Five cars slowed down just outside the Bay Bridge's Yerba Buena Tunnel in a choreographed maneuver that succeeded in blocking off all eastbound lanes, according to CHP.

If people manage to be proud of being perverts, it stands to reason that they can also be proud of the horrible diseases they contract through their perversion. That’s why Twitter is acrawl with the #ShoutYourStatus hashtag, in honor of April being STD Awareness Month: Seems to me that with the virally disproportionate spread of STDs among practitioners of sodomy, it would make more sense to “raise awareness” about the natural consequences of sexual promiscuity during June, which President Obama regularly dubs “LGBT Pride Month.” Nonetheless, and speaking of pride and promiscuity, you oughta head on over to Twitter and...

A 15-year-old boy was killed when he was struck in the head while playing a game of "dodging arrows" at a friend's house, and criminal charges could be possible, authorities said Monday. Caleb Fairchild, an eighth-grader, was playing the bow-and-arrow game Saturday evening when he was hit by an arrow in in Chapmanville, about 45 miles south of Charleston, West Virginia State Police spokesman Lt. Michael Baylous said.

Half of gay and bisexual black men and a quarter of gay and bisexual Hispanic men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes, the Centers for Disease Control announced in a first-of-its-kind study on Tuesday.

The Food and Drug Administration has lifted the ban on blood donations from men who have engaged in sexual relations with another man. Now, in order to donate blood, a man will have had to have been abstinent for the period of one year prior to donation. This new policy is similar to the deferral period for a woman who has engaged in sexual activity with a man who had previously sexual activity with another man, or for someone who has traveled to a country where malaria is prevalent. The Food and Drug Administration released final rules on Monday that...

In 1975, I took a college course in psychology. The professor invited a gay man to speak to the class. He explained to us, "I'm just like you, only I prefer to have sex with men instead of women." No one objected or protested. What did we know? The thesis seemed plausible then, and today most people regard it as axiomatic. The gay agenda is to convince the heterosexual majority that there are no appreciable differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals. We are to believe that sexual preference is merely a personal choice with no broader ramifications for society. The choice...

PARIS — France will lift a ban on blood donations by gay and bisexual men starting next year, officials announced on Wednesday, joining a growing list of countries that have loosened or scrapped such restrictions, which many see as outdated vestiges of the 1980s AIDS crisis. “Giving one’s blood is an act of generosity and of civic responsibility that cannot be conditioned by sexual orientation,” the health minister, Marisol Touraine, said in a statement. “While respecting the absolute security of patients, it is a taboo, a discrimination that is being lifted today.”

Traffic fatalities in the United States have been plummeting for years, a major victory for regulation (strict drunken driving laws have helped) and auto innovation (we have safer cars). But that progress obscures a surprising type of inequality: The most disadvantaged are more likely — and have grown even more likely over time — to die in car crashes than people who are well-off. New research by Sam Harper, Thomas J. Charters and Erin C. Strumpf, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, finds that improvements in road safety since the 1990s haven't been evenly shared. The biggest declines in...

The adolescents had been involved in experiments that had been designed for measuring working memory and their ability for focusing their attention on information relevant to a task. The participants’ impulsivity has also been evaluated in a task that tested their ability to delay gratification. The levels of “sensation seeking”, the tendency for seeking excitement without thinking had been self-reported in this study.

7 teenagers die in Millington joyride Why? By Chris Conley Contact March 1, 2004 A late-night joyride turned to tragedy when a 15-year-old crashed the car he was driving into a tree near Millington, killing himself and six friends. A passing motorist discovered the crushed car and the teens on Chambers Road, between Quito and Epperson Mill roads, about 2:30 a.m. Sunday. Police said they did not know exactly when it happened. The teens, all students at Millington Middle School, were dead when police arrived. They were identified as Michael Fradella, 15, the driver; and passengers Trey Hannah, 15; Lauren...

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention official cited an “epidemic” of syphilis among homosexual men during an event Thursday by a lobbying group pushing for an increase in federal funding for sexually transmitted disease prevention from $157 million to $212 million. “We’re also seeing what we are calling pretty much an epidemic of syphilis among men who have sex with men – that really started in the early – 2000, 2002, but we’ve seen a dramatic increase since 2008,” Dr. Gail Bolan, director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, said at a briefing by the National Coalition of STD...

A syphilis outbreak of "astronomical" proportions has been unleashed in Canada's easternmost province, according to the healthcare authority of eastern NewfoundlandAlready this year — in less than three months — 15 cases of syphilis have been reported, according to Eastern Health. That's more than half the total number of cases (26) confirmed by the region's health authority all of last year. Most of the 41 syphilis infections were identified in homosexual men between 20 and 49 years of age, with 10 of the cases also being diagnosed with HIV, according to Eastern Health. Rising concerns This substantial increase is raising...

Atlanta is ranked number one among US cities when it comes to the rate of new diagnoses of HIV. Experts say that's because routine HIV testing is not offered in the places where most people get their health care. By the time patients are diagnosed in Atlanta, almost one third have advanced to clinical AIDS. Since starting a routine testing program in 2013, Grady Hospital has diagnosed an average of two or three patients with HIV every single day.

Plain old bad luck plays a major role in determining who gets cancer and who does not, according to researchers who found that two-thirds of cancer incidence of various types can be blamed on random mutations and not heredity or risky habits like smoking. The researchers said Thursday that random DNA mutations accumulating in various parts of the body during ordinary cell division were the prime culprits behind many cancer types. They looked at 31 cancer types and found that 22 of them, including leukemia and pancreatic, bone, testicular, ovarian, and brain cancer, could be explained largely by these random...