US relaxes restrictions for gay, bisexual men to donate blood
Updated guidelines will replace the three-month abstention rule that LGBTQ advocates had long labeled discriminatory.
The United States has announced that it will expand the ability of gay and bisexual men to donate blood and move to a single set of criteria for all potential donors.
On Thursday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it updated federal guidelines for blood donations away with requiring men who have sex with men to abstain from sex for three months before donating blood.
Instead, all potential donors — regardless of their sexual orientation, sex, or gender — will be screened with a new questionnaire that evaluates their individual risks of HIV based on sexual behavior, recent partners, and other factors.
“The implementation of these recommendations will be an important milestone for the agency and the LGBTQI+ community,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biological Therapies, said in a statement.
The change came after decades of criticism that the government unfairly discriminated against gay men who wanted to donate blood and forced them to take additional steps before donating, even though AIDS can affect people from different backgrounds.
The new guidelines, which were drafted in January and can now be used by blood banks, focus on individual behavior rather than sexual orientation.
They also state that potential donors who report having had anal sex with a new partner in the past three months are asked to wait to donate until a later date.
The FDA said the new guidelines are in line with the latest scientific evidence and mirror standards in countries such as the United Kingdom and Canada.
Gay rights groups and medical organizations such as the American Medical Association have opposed blanket rules based on sexual orientation, with the AMA noting that advances in blood testing also render them obsolete.
Anyone who has ever tested positive for HIV will not be allowed to donate, and people taking HIV prevention medications such as PrEP will also be banned for up to three months after their last dose.
The LGBTQ rights group Human Rights Campaign welcomed the FDA announcement, saying more steps need to be taken to ensure “people who use PrEP can also donate.” The FDA has stated that PrEP can make it more difficult to detect the virus in screening tests.
Blood donation policies have long been a subject of emotional weight in the LGBTQ community, which suffered abuse, neglect and discrimination from government and civil society organizations during the AIDS crisis.
While the first case of AIDS was discovered in the US in 1981, Republican President Ronald Reagan did not publicly disclose the disease until late 2008. 1985in part because of concerns that showing empathy for victims of a disease many of which are linked to homosexuality could damage his support from groups on the religious right.
By the time Reagan did, more than 21,000 people had died of AIDS nationwide, according to the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.
Black and Hispanic gay men make up “a disproportionate number of HIV diagnoses” in the US, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
However, people of all backgrounds can contract HIV, and the CDC reported that heterosexual contact was responsible for approx 22 percent of broadcasts in 2020.
In 2015, the FDA dropped a previous one lifetime ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men and replaced it with a one-year abstinence requirement, which was revised to three months in 2020.