Gay people banned from giving blood - homophobic? <again>

[Fridayfeeling]

No this is not the 1980s, apparently it is still the case that gay men are banned from donating blood.

The NHS National Blood Service say that its reasons for banning gay people from becoming blood donors come down to cost,their opinion is that blood from a gay person is more likely to be infected than blood from a straight person. Therefore, they say, the costs of screening gay blood are too high.

so do you think there should be no exclusions? that we should pass on infections to people because it would be better to contract HIV and ruin your life, your chances of future relationships/a family than to die? at what cost?

I'm not sure anyone knows where AIDS first originated, but I guess it's undergone many mutations since it first appeared.

Early theories suggested that it originated in Africa and could have been a monkey/ape virus in origin.

Good, and interesting question.

Sure answer is no-one knows for sure.

Best guess is that is started life as SIV, simian Immune deficiency Virus, in Africa. This infected monkeys. It probably jumped the species barrier when people hunted for bush meat, a scratch or bit infected a human. It mutated slightly and became a human virus.

It could then be that it stayed in small rural parts of Africa until it passed to someone who was a trucker who drive across the trans Africa routes. that man, or men (this is largely educated guess work) had sex with prostitutes who worked along the route.

The virus then spread into African cities. Spread in Africa was almost always heterosexual. French people of african origin were amongst the first to be detected with the virus in europe

At some point in the early 1970s a gay man, or men from North America picked up the virus, which then spread, first in NY and then SF and LA. One of the first diagnosed people to have the virus, and later to die of it was a French Canadian canned Gaetan Dugas, who is linked to 15 of the first men to get the disease in the US.

i beleive HIV/AIDS originated in Africa.

there is a 6 month window for HIV, you can be tested and it could show as negaitve yet 6 months later it could be positive.

recently it was in BBC news that about 70% of homosexual men do not actually know they are infected adn spread the disease without realising it. it is not only gays who cannot donate blood, if you have had tattoos adn been certain places on holiday or slept with someone from Africa. please correct me if i am wrong.

i remember my sex education teacher telling me that in one of the world wars a sailor who had been to africa was diagnosed wiht an illness no one could identify, his blood was kept and in the 80s it was investigated and turned out he had AIDS. It has been around for a while but ony in the 80s was it actually recognised iykwim.

Statistics people here - could you explain to me how they say - there are x number of people infected with HIV/AIDS in the UK, and a 1/3 are undiagnosed.............isnt's that a bit Donald Rumsfeld - "there are known knowns and known unknowns etc"

HTF do they know what the undiagnosed numbers are?

and the stigma attached to HIV is still huge. Watched a programme recently where it was said that something like 70% of people would not remain friends with someone if they found out they were HIV positive.

am still at "rather infected blood than no blood.".

you can catch AIDS throug horal sex, the virus is absorbed throug the stomach and also if you have cuts in your mouth or throat etc.

the risk is greater through anal sex as there are major blood vessels in there that can be easily ruptured, torn etc, something like that.

there was at least one case in the 1950s of a man in the UK who was later found to have died of the disease. (tissue samples were frozen at his time of death)

Dugas was not the only person to have spread the virus to the US, but he was central to many of the earliest cases in the gay community

Fridayfeeling I guess the estimates are calculated on the rate at which infection has risen over the years. so e.g. x amount of people will have become infected and died in the 80's/90's etc, and of those a proportion would not have known they were HIV positive, so it would follow that the infection rate would increase, and similarly, the amount of people that didn't know.

"Rather infected blood than no blood".......isn't that a primal question of life or death ........wouldn't you like to live with HIV or die now?

Is that what you meant??

There will be ways and means, Friday, based on historic data.

I bet if I said that 86.2% of adults in the UK were rabid homophobes, you'd accept that statistic without question, though

Has the Blood transfusion service in the UK ever run out?

Serious question here?

I know that they run low, and put the class out over holiday periods etc. But how often do they run out, if ever?

To be fair to me about my points about homophobia...... I think that when we have policies that are freely accepted such as the one we are discussing, there is no doubt that homophobia is alive and well, and also acceptable - so there is no doubt most of us will show SOME homophobic tendencies - probably without meaning to.

Stats show that people are less homophobic....but it is more that they just SAY they are....and obviously everyone here would say they are not homophobic on a questionnaire.......however by accepting that entire groups just because of their sexual orientation, should be discriminated against in this way nad being labelled as unclean, we are, whether we like it or not being homophobic. I really really don't mean to offend and come across too lefty..........but it is a bit strange that we all find it OK to group gay men together in such a way - isn't it??

I find that question appalling - "are you a man who has had oral or anal sex? (Even with protection)"

can't find any evidence that the blood transfusion service has ever ran out.

Fridayfeeling but the question is asked because statistically you are more likely to be HIV positive if you are a gay male. similarly if you have had sex with someone in Africa you are at greater risk (25% of the populations of some countries are HIV positive) so that question is also asked. along with many others.

It is not just gay men that are excluded, other demographics are as well.

HIV can usually be picked up on a test within a few weeks of having contracted the virus, however it is always suggested that a test is repeated 3 months later (if the 1st test is negative) as sometimes it can take this long to show up on a test. This is because the main HIV test is not looking for the HIV virus itself; the test is looking for antibodies that your body produces when it has the virus and it can sometimes take up to 3 months for these to appear.

How we know approximately a third of infected people do not know they are infected is because of surveillance randomised HIV testing of other blood samples. For example, some hospitals / clinics will test every sample of blood taken for the HIV virus, regardless of the reason for the blood being taken in the first place. The staff and the patients never get to know the HIV results, but it provides an idea of the amount of people infected in a population.

i do nto think the blood service is being discriminating towards gays, it is just that statistically they are morew likely to carry the disease. as well as africa that is.

do americans accept british blood due to vCJD?

When I had dd 11 years ago, my blood was taken as part of an anatomised sample to look at numbers of women with the virus.

Average time to sero conversion is about 24 week, just about everyone will have sero converted by 3 months and by 6 months the level that you would fail to detect is at the failure rate of the test

no. and given that vcjd is not detectable in blood it's not really surprising is it?

Message withdrawn

I think it is detectable but it is jsut not tested for it, something maybe to do with cost efficiency and the low chance of actually having it.

funnily enough Simian HIV /siv is not actually fatal to chimps.

I realise the stats show that gay men are statistically more likely to carry HIV - 90 times more likely I think ! But still, it just re-inforces homophobia and also how gay people feel about themselves. I can't agree with making people feel bad about themselves. I just can't - sorry - I think I am a lost cause!

If my DS's were gay, I would not want them to feel bad about it and to me, this sort of policy ensure they would.