Free Republic

It's an issue that has been discussed - and continues to be discussed. Last Friday, the UK decided to lift the ban on prohibiting gays from donating blood. From Times Of India: UK Lifts Ban, Says Gays Can Donate BloodLONDON: Britain said Thursday it was lifting a ban on gay men giving blood providing they have had not had sexual intercourse within a year. A lifetime ban on blood donation by gay men was introduced in Britain in the 1980s as a response to the spread of AIDS and HIV.But a review by a panel of leading experts and patient...

A tick-borne infection known as Babesiosis, which can cause severe disease and even death, is becoming a growing threat to the U.S. blood supply, government researchers said on Monday. There are currently no diagnostic tests approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that can detect the infection before people donate blood.

Should we be screening blood for hepatisi G?Hepatitis G virus was identified in 1995. Some little research was carried out on the virus and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declared it a non-harmful virus in 1997. Researchers in Saudi Arabia, writing in the International Journal of Immunological Studies present evidence to suggest that this may have been the wrong decision. They claim that transmission of the virus through donated blood that was not screened for the virus as well as infection through other routes has led to an increase in cirrhosis of the liver and liver cancer. Hepatitis...

A policy that bars gay men from donating blood for life is “suboptimal,” advisers to the Health and Human Services Department said on Tuesday, and needs another look. HHS asked a committee of experts on blood and tissue donations to reexamine the policy and see if there is a way to let at least some gays donate blood. (snip)Men who have sex with other men, including gay and bisexual men, have an HIV infection rate 60 times higher than that of the general population

... Maybe you fooled around with a guy 30 years ago and have spent the rest of your life as a celibate priest. Maybe you've been in a faithful same-sex marriage for 40 years. Maybe you've passed an HIV test. It doesn't matter. You can't give blood, because you're in the wrong "group." On the other hand, if you're in the right group—heterosexuals—you can give blood despite dangerous behavior. If you had sex with a prostitute, an IV drug user, and an HIV-positive opposite-sex partner 13 months ago, you're good to go. This kind of group-based screening is a long-standing...

Following two days of testimony, a federal panel Friday voted against recommending changes to ease the current blood donation restrictions for gay men, saying more research was needed to help “create a road map forward” for future change. By a 9-6 vote, members of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability agreed to continue the current donor policy which rejects blood donations from any man who has had sex with another man — a category know as "MSM" — even once in the past 33 years. Gay rights groups and others...

Groups urge government to lift lifetime restriction Should gay men be allowed to donate blood? A government health committee is re-examining that question today. A regulation created at the height of the 1980s' AIDS epidemic banned men who have had sex with another man since 1977 from ever giving blood. Advocacy groups, blood-collection organizations and some members of Congress are calling for the Food and Drug Administration to revise the lifetime ban, which has been reviewed twice in the past 10 years, but left unchanged.

With the public focused on the calamity of the Gulf oil spill, another disaster that could affect millions of lives is in the making. The federal Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability is holding meetings on June 10 and June 11 to consider lifting the ban on gay blood. Cliff Kincaid, president of the public policy group, America's Survival, Inc. (ASI), is scheduled to testify in favor of the ban. If the ban is lifted, Kincaid argues, the five million Americans a year who receive blood transfusions could be exposed to the AIDS virus or other infections in the...

While the Obama Administration and its "progressive" supporters in Congress insist they want a federal health care bill to protect people from deadly diseases, liberal senators led by John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Al Franken (D-Minn.) have pressured the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into considering lifting the ban on male homosexuals donating blood. It's a decision that could mean disease and death for many Americans, and billions of dollars in additional health care costs. "John Kerry Supports Gay Blood" declared a column on a pro-homosexual website. Kerry, Franken and 16 other liberal senators insist they want the blood supply...

BOSTON -- Gay men should be allowed to donate blood and laws banning them from doing so are discriminatory and outdated, according to Sen. John Kerry and several of his Senate colleagues. "Not a single piece of scientific evidence supports the ban,” Kerry said. “A law that was once considered medically justified is today simply outdated and needs to end." Kerry was one of 16 U.S. Senators who in a letter on Thursday asked the Food and Drug Administration to lift the ban on gay men donating blood. The ban was put in place in 1983, at the height of...

For years, the use of unscreened blood transfusions exposed severely wounded servicemembers and other trauma patients in Iraq and Afghanistan to the inherent risk of diseases such as HIV, hepatitis and malaria, according to medical experts who advise the secretary of defense. Battlefield attacks that resulted in mass casualties or severe injuries often overtaxed the military’s blood supply system until 2007, meaning medics collected fresh blood from those on site for emergency treatment of the wounded, the Defense Health Board wrote in a June 2008 report. The unscreened blood transfusions, however, did not meet federal safety standards required of all...

No one knows how many Americans were infected with HIV through blood transfusions, but many more were spared misery and death after authorities in 1983 banned donations from men who have had sex with other men and in 1985 began screening donated blood for the virus. From a public-health standpoint, the precautions make sense. Food and Drug Administration statistics show homosexuals' HIV risk is 60 times greater than heterosexuals'. To no one's surprise, the measures have been very effective. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 6,050 people who developed AIDS from HIV-tainted blood products before the ban was...

SOUTH Africa's blood donor service has banned blood from sexually active homosexual men due to a higher risk of HIV, it said overnight, provoking an angry response from gay activists. "A man who has had sex with another man within the last five years, whether oral or anal sex, with or without a condom ... is not permitted to donate blood and must please not do so," Sapa news agency quoted the head of the South African National Blood Service, Dr. Robert Crookes, as saying. South Africa has the world's highest number of HIV cases with more than 5 million...

Police have moved to arrest 15 people in connection with an illegal blood selling scandal which has been blamed for spreading HIV/AIDS, officials announced yesterday. According to Vice-Minister for Health Ma Xiaowei, the arrests are all linked to 106 known cases involving unsafe blood collection, the illegal organization of people to sell plasma, and serious malpractice in supervising the blood market. Ma made the announcement at a national television and telephone conference campaigning against the unsafe blood market, one of the main causes for the spread of blood borne diseases, including HIV/AIDS, in China in the early 1990s. Thousands of...

BOSTON, Feb. 25 - American scientists said Friday that they had discovered two new human viruses in Africa that belong to the same family, retroviruses, as the virus that causes AIDS. So far, the scientists said, the new viruses have not been linked to any disease, but they are being monitored out of concern that they or similar retroviruses might conceivably spawn another epidemic. The viruses, found in rural Cameroon among people who hunt monkeys and other primates, were probably transmitted from the animals through blood from bites and scratches received in hunting, butchering and keeping the primates as pets,...

To help prevent spread of the human form of mad cow disease, individuals who received a blood transfusion in France since 1980 should be barred from donating blood in the United States, a federal advisory panel recommended Tuesday. The members of the Food and Drug Administration's advisory committee said this would somewhat strengthen safeguards for the U.S. blood supply without significantly limiting the pool of potential donors. The panel voted 12-3 with one abstention. *snip*The panel acted as concerns are growing that the brain-wasting disease can be spread through transfusion. In Britain, two cases of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, as the...

(CNSNews.com) - An HIV-infected man who is fighting to regain his job as a blood technician has received a legal assist from the American Civil Liberties Union and a homosexual advocacy group. In briefs filed Thursday, Lambda Legal and the ACLU told a federal appeals court in Denver that John Couture should have the same protections from discrimination as other people with disabilities. The Bonfils Memorial Blood Center in Denver removed Couture from a training program for technicians who draw blood from donors after Couture told a supervisor he was HIV positive. According to press reports, Couture volunteered the information...

Unnecessary regulations are making blood banks run dry. If you walked into a blood donation center before the HIV crisis, you would have been asked 15 quick questions, then either accepted as a donor or not. Today those questions have burgeoned to almost 50, and the list continues to grow. The extra caution stems from a colossal error that blood bank officials made two decades ago, when they ignored the early warning signs of HIV and failed to implement appropriate screening and cleaning procedures. As a result, America’s blood supply became contaminated and 20,000 people were infected with the deadly...

<p>MONMOUTH, Ore. — The American Red Cross may soon be banned from holding blood drives on one university campus because the organization prohibits some gay men from donating blood.</p> <p>"We're looking at the practices of the Red Cross — whether they are discriminatory, and if they are, how it relates back to our policy," said Gary Dukes, vice president of student affairs at Western Oregon University.</p>

A parasitic infection common in Latin America is threatening the United States blood supply, public health experts say. They are especially concerned because there will be no test for it in donated blood until next year at the earliest. The infection, Chagas disease, is still rare in this country. Only nine cases are known to have been transmitted by transfusion or transplant in the United States and Canada in the last 20 years. But hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected, experts say, and there is no effective treatment for them. After a decade or more, 10 to 30...

Patients launch 'bad blood' suit Thousands of haemophiliacs have filed a lawsuit in the US against four companies for allegedly exposing them to the HIV virus by selling products made with contaminated blood. The lawsuit alleges the companies continued distributing the blood-clotting products in Asia and Latin America in the 1980s, despite having stopped selling them in the US because of the known risk of passing on HIV and hepatitis C. The four companies named are: Bayer Corporation, Baxter Healthcare Corporation, Armour Pharmaceutical Company and Alpha Therapeutic Corporation. The lawsuit alleges that they purchased plasma from "the highest-risk populations, including...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's blood banks issued an urgent appeal for blood donations Tuesday, saying much of the country has less than a two-day supply on hand. Some hospitals are postponing elective surgeries because blood supplies are so low, with less than a single day's supply in certain areas. Banks try to keep a five- to seven-day supply on hand. In an unusual appeal, the nation's two main blood suppliers - the American Red Cross and America's Blood Centers - joined Tuesday to urge prompt donations. The Red Cross said that during the past two weeks, its blood supplies...

  Feds Issue GuidelinesPotential Smallpox Vaccine Harm To Blood Supply ?* Deferral of Donors - Donor Suitability* Quarantine and Retrieval of Blood and Blood Products* Contacts with Smallpox Vaccine RecipientsFULL FDA FINAL GUIDANCE http://www.fda.gov/cber/gdlns/smpoxdefquar.htm Immediate Implementation  

People getting medical help after an accident, fire or other emergency in Missouri now may be tested for contagious diseases such as hepatitis -- whether they want the test or not. The law, a surprise to the American Civil Liberties Union and to some hospitals, assumes patient consent to be tested if a patient's blood or other bodily fluids are exposed to emergency care providers. Missouri firefighters, hoping to reduce their chances of catching a disease in the line of duty, quietly persuaded the Missouri General Assembly to pass the law in May. At least two Kansas City firefighters have...