Australia lifts plasma donation ban for gay, bisexual men in world first
Australia lifts plasma donation ban for gay, bisexual men in world first
www.bbc.com
Australia lifts plasma donation ban for gay, bisexual men in world first
2 comments
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The rules, originally introduced to decrease the risk of blood donations from groups with a higher chance of HIV exposure
Hasn't it been super easy to test for HIV for ages now? If they truly cared, they would just test for it, with an extra bonus being that anyone donating blood who don't know they have HIV can actually find out and get treatment. They already test donors for blood type to avoid having people misreport their types. This seems like more of a revisionist excuse to cover up the original homophobic reasons for the ban, i.e. preventing "pure, straight, god fearing Christians from being contaminated with demonic gay blood" or something.
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Can't speak for every country, but having donated with the American Red Cross in the past, I know that they test every sample of blood for HIV.
Like the article mentions, there's still a restriction on donating if you have sex with new partners in the US, which I guess seems a bit redundant when they test for HIV anyways, but I can't claim to know how foolproof their internal mitigation models are at tracking and removing positive results. Swiss cheese rule might apply, who knows.
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