FDA Advisers: Keep Ban on Gay Male Blood Donors
Sept. 14, 2000 (Washington) -- In a controversial move, a panel of expert FDA advisers Thursday refused to endorse a proposed policy change that would allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood.
Under current federal policy, any man who has had sex with another man even once since 1977 is banned permanently from giving blood. The proposed new rules would have permitted these men to donate blood five years after their last such encounter, but the FDA panel said this would still pose an unacceptable risk.
But Louis Katz, MD, chairman of the Transmitted Disease Committee of the American Association of Blood Banks, says the proposed new policy would neither increase the risk of transmitting HIV through blood transfusions nor compromise the safety of the blood supply. Katz, whose group supports the change, says it would simply make the rules for men who have had sex with men more consistent with the policies applied to other high-risk sexual behaviors -- including heterosexual ones.
The lifetime ban was established in the early 1980s, when little was known about HIV or its transmission. At the time, the FDA said that it was necessary because there was no way to determine if such men were HIV positive.
That logic no longer applies, says Celso Bianco, MD, a spokesman for the American Blood Centers, an association of nonprofit blood centers whose members collectively gather nearly half of the U.S. blood supply. Over the last two decades, much progress has been made in both our understanding of the risk of HIV transmission and the development of screening tests, Bianco says.
For example, it is now understood that behavior, not sexual preference, is a better gauge of a potential donor's risk of HIV infection, Bianco says. And with the new tests, blood banks are now far better equipped to detect contaminated blood before it is distributed, Bianco says.
HIV historically has been detected using a test for the antibodies that are produced by the body to fight the infection, a process that begins anywhere from 50 to 80 days from when the virus is contracted. But blood banks have significantly reduced this 80-day "window" during which an infected donor might not be detected by using newer screening tests such as the nucleic acid test (NAT).
FDA Advisers: Keep Ban on Gay Male Blood Donors
Sept. 14, 2000 (Washington) -- In a controversial move, a panel of expert FDA advisers Thursday refused to endorse a proposed policy change that would allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood.
Under current federal policy, any man who has had sex with another man even once since 1977 is banned permanently from giving blood. The proposed new rules would have permitted these men to donate blood five years after their last such encounter, but the FDA panel said this would still pose an unacceptable risk.
But Louis Katz, MD, chairman of the Transmitted Disease Committee of the American Association of Blood Banks, says the proposed new policy would neither increase the risk of transmitting HIV through blood transfusions nor compromise the safety of the blood supply. Katz, whose group supports the change, says it would simply make the rules for men who have had sex with men more consistent with the policies applied to other high-risk sexual behaviors -- including heterosexual ones.
The lifetime ban was established in the early 1980s, when little was known about HIV or its transmission. At the time, the FDA said that it was necessary because there was no way to determine if such men were HIV positive.
That logic no longer applies, says Celso Bianco, MD, a spokesman for the American Blood Centers, an association of nonprofit blood centers whose members collectively gather nearly half of the U.S. blood supply. Over the last two decades, much progress has been made in both our understanding of the risk of HIV transmission and the development of screening tests, Bianco says.
For example, it is now understood that behavior, not sexual preference, is a better gauge of a potential donor's risk of HIV infection, Bianco says. And with the new tests, blood banks are now far better equipped to detect contaminated blood before it is distributed, Bianco says.
HIV historically has been detected using a test for the antibodies that are produced by the body to fight the infection, a process that begins anywhere from 50 to 80 days from when the virus is contracted. But blood banks have significantly reduced this 80-day "window" during which an infected donor might not be detected by using newer screening tests such as the nucleic acid test (NAT).