By Steven Bodzin. The Red Cross's new position is prompting the US Food and Drug Administration to consider starting a risk assessment that would take three to six months, and may lead the agency to reverse its 16-year-old ban, which excludes any man who has had gay sex since 1977 from ever donating blood.
- From: Don Saklad <dsaklad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 20 Mar 2006 13:18:07 -0500
By Steven Bodzin
http://tinyurl.com/fazve
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/03/18/red_cross_eases_ban_on_gay_donors/
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Red Cross eases ban on gay donors
Ban is called 'unfair and discriminatory'
By Steven Bodzin, Bloomberg | March 18, 2006
SAN FRANCISCO -- The American Red Cross, which for
more than a decade has supported a lifetime ban on
blood donations by men who have sex with men, now
believes those men should be able to donate if they
go a year without gay sex.
The Red Cross's new position is prompting the US Food
and Drug Administration to consider starting a risk
assessment that would take three to six months, and
may lead the agency to reverse its 16-year-old ban,
which excludes any man who has had gay sex since 1977
from ever donating blood. The agency reaffirmed the
ban in 2000, citing Red Cross support.
An official with the Red Cross, a Washington-based
nonprofit that collects about 45 percent of the blood
donated in the United States, said it changed its
view last summer, though it made no public statement
then. The first public signal by the group came March
8 at an FDA workshop on whether better HIV tests made
the ban unnecessary.
The Red Cross calls the ban ''unfair and
discriminatory" in a statement on the American
Association of Blood Banks website. ''It does not
appear rational to treat gay sex differently from
straight sex," the statement says, noting that in
some cases, the ban led to cancellation of blood
drives.
At the University of Maine in Orono, for instance,
the student government changed vendors for its blood
drive in 2005 in protest against the Red Cross,
replacing it with a blood center that supported equal
treatment for gay men, according to Derek Mitchell,
who led the push for change as a member of student
government.
The ban has attracted protest across the United
States, with much of the anger directed at the Red
Cross, which made $2.1 billion in sales of blood and
blood products in 2004. A similar ban has been the
subject of protests in the United Kingdom.
''Having sex with a man does not put you at high
risk," said John Givner, director of the HIV project
at Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a New
York-based gay rights group, in a telephone interview
in July 2005. ''Having unprotected anal or vaginal
sex does."
He and other gay rights leaders have said they want
blood banks to ask whether donors used condoms,
instead of questioning whether they had same-sex
relations.
Gay students at 30 college campuses plan to go to
clinics April 5 to show that there are healthy gay
men who wish to donate blood, according to an
organizing website, FightToGiveLife.org.
The ban was based on earlier FDA risk models that
showed that one or more units of HIV-positive blood a
year could slip through controls and infect
recipients. Dr. Louis Katz, a member of the agency's
Blood Products Advisory Committee, said recent
changes in blood handling and testing may have
reduced risks.
Gays aren't the only group excluded from blood
donation, according to the Red Cross. FDA rules
prohibit people from donating blood for a variety of
reasons, such as recent tattoos and possible exposure
to mad cow disease in the UK. People possibly exposed
to HIV through heterosexual sex are currently barred
from donating for a year.
Katz said the FDA would likely bring together risk
modelers to agree on a model and data, a process that
could take three to six months. If the modeling shows
little to no increased risk, the FDA could consider
changing the rules, he said.
''With the way we test donors now and the control
blood facilities have over their products, we won't
be able to measure a decrease in safety from rolling
back the deferral from lifetime to one year," Katz
said.
An FDA spokesman said the timeline for studying risks
to the blood supply may be slower. ''Prospective
studies to measure the effects of any policy change,
though possible, would be lengthy, difficult to
perform, and might not be conclusive," said agency
spokesman Stephen King in an e-mail response.
The Red Cross discussed its new policy in depth at
last week's FDA meeting, titled ''Workshop on
Behavior-Based Blood Donor Deferrals in the Era of
Nucleic Acid Testing," said Ryland Dodge, the group's
director of biomedical communications, in a telephone
interview.
Dodge said the group actually adopted its new policy
last summer, though it made no public announcement at
the time. It was first reported yesterday in the
Washington Blade, a gay-oriented newspaper in
Washington, D.C.
Dodge refused to comment on the issue further,
referring a reporter to the statement on the Blood
Banks' website.
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