If we have a ready, willing, and able supply, let’s get on it.” “Number two, we always have shortage of blood. “Number one, it’s a bad policy,” Quigley told the Reader. Last December, the lifetime ban was lifted and changed to the current rule that bans men who have sex with men from donating unless they have been celibate for the past 12 months.īut Quigley, who’s pushed for years to repeal the lifetime ban, doesn’t think the current legislation makes sense either. Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Blood and Tissue Safety and Availability determined the ban was “suboptimal” and decided to reevaluate its blood-donation criteria. “It was more panic than reason,” says Illinois congressman Mike Quigley, the vice chair of the congressional LGBT Equality Caucus. At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, the FDA instituted a lifetime ban on gay or bisexual men donating blood. Since the FDA regulates blood collection on a federal level, it impacts how blood banks in Illinois and other states can accept donations. The National Institutes of Health says in its general guidelines most people will typically develop antibodies within three months, but the “window can vary depending on the HIV test being used.” While the detection window was once three to six months, Sherer says HIV can now be detected as early as two to four weeks within infection. Sherer says the latest generation of testing ensures the blood supply is “99.9 percent” safe and prescreened for various infectious diseases including HIV and hepatitis, in a similar fashion to how organs are prescreened before a donation is implanted inside a recipient. We’ve always had good antibody tests, where we could test if someone was affected, but with the new tests we can detect acute infection before the antibodies are even produced.” “Because technology is so much better, we can test more accurately and detect earlier on. “A ban in the past made sense, but that’s not the case anymore,” Sherer says. The techniques used to screen donated blood have improved in recent years, says Renslow Sherer, a professor of medicine at University of Chicago who specializes in infectious diseases with an emphasis on HIV. These policies aren’t based on science or data.” “It perpetuates a stigma that dehumanizes the gay community. “The irony of the whole situation is this policy is rooted in discrimination,” Gardenhire says. Food and Drug Administration’s policy bans gay or bisexual men who have sex with another man in the past 12 months from donating blood. history, many gay and bisexual men in Chicago and cities around the country have wanted to donate blood but have been denied. In the wake of Sunday’s massacre in Orlando that left 49 dead and 53 wounded in the worst mass shooting in U.S. There have been many times since then when I’ve wanted to give blood but can’t because of who I choose to love.” “It was the most surreal thing, going to law school and trying to do my civic duty and then hearing that.
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“I was floored,” says 38-year-old Gardenhire, who finished law school in 2003 and is now vice president of policy for the AIDS Foundation of Chicago.
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#CAN GAY MEN DONATE BLOOD IN ORLANDO SERIES#
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