Important news if you ever think you may need to receive blood at some point:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued proposed guidance Friday to ease restrictions on blood donations by men who have sex with men. ...
The restrictions on donating blood date back to the early days of the AIDS epidemic and were designed to protect the blood supply from HIV. Originally, gay and bisexual men were completely prohibited from donating blood. Over time, the FDA relaxed the lifetime ban, but still kept in place some limits.
It's worth pointing out that there was a good reason those restrictions were originally in place: The CDC states that "over half of people with HIV are gay and bisexual men," while "most new HIV infections" occur among that demographic.
The new policy is significantly more relaxed than even the latest revisions from 2020:
Under the current policy — last updated in 2020 — men who have sex with men can donate blood if they haven't had sexual contact with other men for three months.
The new proposed policy would eliminate the time-based restrictions on men who have sex with men (and their female partners) and instead assess potential donors' eligibility based on a series of questions that assess their HIV risk, regardless of gender.
So instead of an objective time standard (which itself was already lax), we have a subjective "assessment" process that ignores one of the most predictive factors of HIV infection, i.e., whether or not you are a gay man.
Here's how they're going to judge it:
The risk assessment would include questions about anal sex. Potential donors who've had anal sex in the last three months with a new sexual partner or more than one sexual partner would not be eligible to give blood.
The flaw in this standard is obvious: Even if you just have one sexual partner, if that partner is hooking up with multiple people, then you're essentially just as much at risk for STDs, including HIV.
