Blood and tears

Today there is an interesting article in the Melbourne Age:


http://www.theage.com.au/national/blood-review-on-gays-20100412-s48f.html

This is an issue for gay people all over the world. In Australia, there have been several attempts to challenge the discriminatory practices of the Red Cross, most notably the efforts of Michael Cain in Launceston mentioned in the Age article.

The fact is that statistically the issue is not about gay men in particular, but more about risky practices. While the current rules stem from the early days of the discovery of HIV, when tests to detect the virus were unreliable and took a long time, medical science has now moved to a point where the tests are much quicker and also much more reliable.

This means that there are many gay men who can safely donate blood. At the same time, there have always been, and still are, many heterosexual people engaging in risky practices who donate blood.

Our country is comparable to other similar nations such as Canada and Sweden. Sweden, having taken a sensible look at the issue, has reversed the ban on gay men donating blood, concentrating on risky behaviour rather than singling out one group of “risky” people. Even Russia, normally regarded as quite homophobic, reversed its ban on gay blood donors from May 2008.

Meanwhile, as late as September last year a Canadian man was prosecuted for donating blood, having simply lied about his sexual orientation on the donor questionnaire.

This begs the question, “How many Australian donors are simply lying on their questionnaires?” Surely, the responsible thing for the Red Cross to do is to put in place blood screening procedures which would detect any blood borne diseases in any donated blood, irrespective of who the donors are — as any donor may be lying about having engaged in risky practice (such as drug use with needle sharing, unprotected heterosexual sex etc).

The original rules were put in place for a good reason, but that reason was the difficulty of detecting HIV, which is now no longer the case. Now in the 21st century it is time to make new rules that reflect the reality of medical science and not a knee-jerk reaction to something that was not understood at the time it occurred, back in the 20th century.

The important thing about changing the rules to reflect the present state of medical science, is that as long as such discriminatory policies exist, based on a blanket categorisation of all gay men, many people in society (such as ignorant, homophobic politicians) feel confident in pointing to such rules as a way of validating their fear and loathing of gay people in general. The sooner this kind of broad, and statistically unsound, discrimination is ended, wherever it occurs, the sooner people in general will feel that there is nothing in particular that makes gays “different” in the sense of something to fear, distrust or dislike.

It will be interesting to see what the politicians and media columnists chime in and say about this issue as it will be a telling indicator of their level of ignorance or intelligence.

For some more information about this issue, see the following pages:

http://gay.americablog.com/2009/12/sweden-to-end-ban-on-gay-blood-donors.html

http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/2008/05/russia-reverses-gay-blood-ban-canada-still-lags/

http://www.slapupsidethehead.com/2009/09/canadian-blood-services-sues-gay-man-for-donating-blood/

http://www.365gay.com/opinion/culhane-its-time-to-end-the-gay-blood-ban/