An anticipated change in FDA coverage would make it simpler for males who’ve intercourse with males to donate blood.
Toby Talbot/AP
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Toby Talbot/AP
An anticipated change in FDA coverage would make it simpler for males who’ve intercourse with males to donate blood.
Toby Talbot/AP
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration issued proposed steering Friday to ease restrictions on blood donations by males who’ve intercourse with males.
The change is predicted to take impact after a public remark interval.
The restrictions on donating blood date again to the early days of the AIDS epidemic and have been designed to guard the blood provide from HIV. Originally, homosexual and bisexual males have been utterly prohibited from donating blood. Over time, the FDA relaxed the lifetime ban, however nonetheless saved in place some limits.
Under the present coverage — final up to date in 2020 — males who’ve intercourse with males can donate blood in the event that they have not had sexual contact with different males for 3 months.
The new proposed coverage would remove the time-based restrictions on males who’ve intercourse with males (and their feminine companions) and as a substitute assess potential donors’ eligibility based mostly on a sequence of questions that assess their HIV danger, no matter gender. Anyone taking medicines to deal with or forestall HIV, together with PrEP, wouldn’t be eligible.
The danger evaluation would come with questions on anal intercourse. Potential donors who’ve had anal intercourse within the final three months with a brand new sexual companion or multiple sexual companion wouldn’t be eligible to offer blood.
The modifications are geared toward addressing criticism that the present coverage is discriminatory and outdated, in addition to yet another barrier to bolstering the nation’s blood provide. Blood banks already routinely display donated blood for HIV.
In crafting the brand new steering, the FDA has been seeking to the outcomes of a research of about 1,600 homosexual and bisexual males to develop screening questions that may establish potential donors who’re probably to be contaminated with HIV.
For a few years, the American Medical Association, the American Red Cross and LGBTQ+ advocacy teams have been pushing for a change to the federal guidelines on blood donations.
“It’s a discriminatory coverage that assumes that HIV is a homosexual illness, and it is vitally a lot not,” Tony Morrison from the group GLAAD, informed NPR in December. “This is what we have now been advocating for for a lot of, a few years.”