So, the rationale behind banning a whole group of people who are sexually active, regardless of the actual risk they have of being HIV-positive, is questionable.
There is a small period of time where a person could be acutely infected, and we wouldn’t be able to test that either from a person’s blood, but our assays would be able to detect any virus in the blood. We can do tests on individuals’ blood to see whether they have been infected with very great sensitivity. Our ability to screen blood products for is really excellent right now. But they are still restricting men who have had sex with men within the past three months from donating blood.
In 2015, the ban was changed to one year, meaning a gay man would have to abstain from sexual activity for a full year in order to donate blood.Ĭoinciding with the recent shortages of blood donation, the FDA has changed restrictions from one year to three months. Up until 2015, any man who had had sex with another man was banned from blood donation for life. So, this has evolved a long way, but the US has still maintained a fairly regressive policy that a lot of people believe puts irrational or homophobic restrictions on who could donate blood. We have good tests to diagnose people withĪnd we have sensitive assays to test blood products to make sure they are safe to be given for donation. We’ve obviously come a long way both in terms of our understanding of the epidemiology of and our ability to safely test and screen blood products. When the ban was started, in 1985, blood banks had limited abilities to test blood products, so they banned donations from several groups who were found to have higher rates of HIV disease, including gay men. So can gay men donate blood now? It’s complicatedĬould you explain, in brief, the history behind this restriction and how it came to be?īack in the 1980s, the FDA placed restrictions on blood donations by gay men. Here, Katharine Bar, an assistant professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn with expertise in HIV and general infectious disease care, talks about the issue from a medical standpoint:
The new policy-which temporarily revises restrictions to three months-has drawn attention to the controversial decades-long policy, and summoned calls for a permanent lifting of the rules altogether. “For example, a gay man in a monogamous relationship would be at low risk of HIV acquisition, but still be banned from blood donation currently.” The rules previously called for 12 months of abstinence before donation. The FDA announced last month that they were relaxing blood donation restrictions on men who have sex with men.