Posted on 12/23/2014 11:05:08 AM PST by reaganaut1
The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday that it would scrap a decades-old lifetime prohibition on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, a change that experts said was long overdue and could lift the annual blood supply by as much as 4 percent.
The F.D.A. enacted the ban in 1983, early in the AIDS epidemic. At the time, little was known about the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes the disease, and there was no quick test to determine whether somebody had it. But science — and the understanding of H.I.V. in particular — has advanced in the intervening decades, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. acknowledged as much, lifting the lifetime ban but keeping in place a more modest block on donations by men who have had sex with other men in the last 12 months.
In a statement, the agency said it had “carefully examined and considered the scientific evidence” before changing the policy. It said it intended to issue a draft guidance detailing the change in 2015.
The shift puts the United States on par with European countries like Britain, which adjusted its lifetime ban in favor of a 12-month restriction in 2011. Men’s health advocates welcomed the move, saying that the ban was not based on the latest science and that it perpetuated stigma about gay men as a risk to the health of the nation. [...]
“This is a major victory for gay civil rights,” said I. Glenn Cohen, a law professor at Harvard University who specializes in bioethics and health. “We’re leaving behind the old view that every gay man is a potential infection source." He said, however, that the policy was “still not rational enough."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ovens are so yesterday!
Amen to that, such infections dump enormous expenses, even with insurance, on you for the rest of your life. By the virtue of treatment being so expensive, you’d think some sane person would take some drastic action to prevent the spread.
“Why?”
‘Cause Liberalism is small ‘c’ communism and therefore all Liberals seize every opportunity to weaken America every time they can.
I would prefer to die....
or Ryan Whites...
Because YOUR life doesn’t matter, only liberal politics matters.
Funny. I can’t give blood because I was stationed in Germany during the 80s. Never thought it was a civil rights issue.
The FDA is willing to sacrifice some innocent people to satisfy the homo lobby. Just like there were warnings that the blood supply was tainted long before the FDA admitted that there was something called AIDs that was killing mostly homo’s.
Is it possible to give your own blood for future use? Can it be frozen? Is there an expiration date?
The blood supply is now contaminated.
Just one more stick in the fire to fuel Cloward-Piven. Guess the Ebola gambit didn’t work out as well as they hoped.
From the article...
“...The Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, has calculated that the change could add about 317,000 pints of blood to the nation’s supply annually, an increase of 2 percent to 4 percent.
About 8.5 percent of American men — or about 10 million people — report having had sex at least once with a man since turning 18, according to the Institute....”
That would be the “Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.”
Color me skeptical....
OMG! THIS is INSANITY, criminal negligence and not based on sound medical OR scientific practices and is akin to murder in the name of political correctness.
What happened to FIRST DO NO HARM??!!
It is called autologous blood donation and many facilities provide for it where there is time for advance planning involving elective surgery.
For most people I think even one is too many, for the PC crowd, it does not matter how many die (unless it is a close friend or relative of theirs).
Yes, that is quite common. Before you go into a pre-planned surgery you can donate your own blood or the blood of a family member or match.
“...an increase of 2 percent to 4 percent.”
______________________________________________
Add in the loss of 10 to 20 percent of donors who will now refuse to donate to these politically correct leftists and see what ya got.
remember “If it saves just one life, it’s worth it”
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