J9ACK9 said:
Every single drop of blood that blood banks get is prescreened for a wide variety of diseases before it's ever given to another human being, thus effectively (as far as I can see) eliminating any significant need to bar specific groups of people from trying to donate.
I'm perfectly happy to give blood, have plenty of times in the past, but any group that continues to promote the sigma that gay people are somehow "unfit" to give blood at all only helps perpetuate the stereotype that homosexuals are more promiscuous and more unsafe sexually than other people.
Male homosexuality
is a risk group. Between 2006 and 2009 in the US gay men have accounted for 61% of new HIV infections while only being 2% of the population. The CDC estimates about 77% of all new infections can still be traced back to male on male action. Now there are several theories on why this is but that's not really important in this context, suffice to say there sadly still is a definitively increased infection risk.
Now yes, all blood donations get tested routinely but the thing is that these tests can't catch everything. The reason many countries won't allow donations from someone who spent too much time in the UK in the 80s and 90s is because these people carry an increased risk of BSE, which has been proven to be infectious over donor blood but can currently not be tested for in the context of a donor screening.
As with HIV that
can and will indeed be testet for, but the thing is this is what we call an antibody test, or more specifically usually an immunoassay test. Here you add a macromolecule specifically targeted by HIV antibodies to a blood sample and if there are antibodies present it will bind and emit some kind of signal. This of course requires HIV antibodies to be present and the thing is these antibodies aren't produced instantly but over a certain time called the "window period". This window period for HIV is anywhere from 1 to 3 months, in about 3% of cases it can even take up to half a year between infection and possible detection, which means you could be infectious and still donate blood for months and all these tests would do is give false negatives.
There was a case of HIV infection caused by a bad blood transfusion just a few months ago in Austria and lots of people went crazy over it. Fortunately it was an 80 year old woman, which is of course tough luck for her but still better than a kid or something.
These things still
can happen, but they don't very often because we make sure that all risks are eliminated. It's not a discrimination against homosexuality per se, it's the exclusion of a risk factor in exchange for additional safety of donor blood. Homosexual men should have every right to donate blood if they are willing to and as far as I know they are free to do here for medical experiments and such where it's not going to be used on other humans but if it's avoidable with enough regular donors it is really a question of perceived discrimination vs. real risk increase, not exactly the baseless homophobia you make it out to be.
damnit...