The victim of a car accident can require as many as 100 pints of blood—that's blood from 100 generous donors across the country, meticulously matched for blood type and screened for diseases. More than 38,000 blood donations are needed daily in the U.S., but only 38 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, and of those, only 8 percent actually do.
The list of eligibility criteria that a donor must meet is long, ranging from simple characteristics such as age and weight requirements to more complex ones surrounding medical and travel history. Among them is the risk for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Certain factors thought to increase this risk, including illicit intravenous drug use and, if you're a man, having had sex with another male even once since 1971, currently prohibit you from ever donating blood. But AIDS research pioneers from the Jewish General Hospital and McGill University in Montreal think the ban is outdated. In their report, published May 25 in the Canadian Medical Association Journal , they call for a change in policy, which was created by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1983—before HIV/AIDS screening tests were available. "Today's technology makes it almost impossible for HIV to slip through, and the total ban puts a huge burden on blood agencies and the blood supply," said lead author Mark Wainberg, in a prepared statement. He helped in the discovery of 3TC, one of the first drugs to control HIV. "We constantly have blood shortages that would not occur, perhaps, if we had a more reasonable policy."(via Scientific American)
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I've been aconsistent blood donor since I turned 18, and I've often wondered about these questions that seem almost ignorant for our time and current medical technologies. Does it really matter whether a man has come into contact with another man's genitals? We're talking about saving lives, and all blood is run through a series of tests before it's accepted by the blod bank in question. So can we stop judgin whether someone has had sex for payment in the past, and let that person potentially save a life if their blood is accepted?
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