Proper Discrimination

As the Harvard-Yale Blood Challenge collected donations last week, some Harvard students and potential donors weren’t allowed to do their part in crushing our rival. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires blood drives to turn away perspective donors who respond affirmatively to questions asking if they are male and have “had sexual contact with another male, even once, since 1977,” or are female and have had sexual contact with a male of that description. The American Red Cross has no choice but to enforce FDA restrictions. This restriction, however, is not only an unfair “lifetime deferral,” but is also built on a decades-old stereotype and is no longer statistically viable or medically warranted. The FDA should remove or rephrase its restrictions, and men who have had sex with men should not be prevented from donating blood.

When the FDA first introduced the current questionnaire phrasing as a guideline in 1983, statistics showed that men who had sex with men were far more likely to carry HIV than those engaging in heterosexual intercourse. In 1985, 64 percent of HIV cases were transmitted through sex between two men; heterosexual activity accounted for only 3 percent of transmissions. These statistics no longer hold true. As of 2004, HIV cases arising from male sex dropped to 42 percent, and those arising from heterosexual sex rose to 31 percent.

Even more importantly, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) now perform two tests on all blood donated in order to detect the presence of HIV (by testing for antibodies and the virus’s genetic material), and the probability of HIV-positive blood going unnoticed after passing through these tests is about one in two million. In light of such dramatic changes in HIV transmission—and with reliable technology to test blood for HIV—preventing men who have had sex with men from donating is now nothing but discrimination against homosexual males. The Red Cross regularly faces difficulty collecting enough blood to meet demand, and allowing as many people to donate as possible is in everyone’s best interest. Disqualifying this segment of the population helps no one.

If the FDA is concerned about disease transmission through blood donations—which it rightly should be—it would do better to rephrase its questionnaire. Currently, the screening fails to ask about sexual behaviors such as unprotected sex and heterosexual anal sex, which both are methods of HIV transmission. In order to be safe and properly discriminatory, the FDA should address all forms of high-risk behavior without singling out homosexual men.

Concerned citizens should protest the FDA’s current phrasing and demand change. However, boycotting Red Cross blood drives punishes patients in need of blood transfusions instead of targeting FDA officials who have the power to modify restrictions. We encourage students to voice their concerns publicly, while continuing to donate blood.