Blood Brothers

The FDA should treat high-risk blood donors, gay or straight, equally.

UNDER A 24-year-old FDA policy, men who have had gay sex, even once, since 1977 are barred from donating blood for the rest of their lives. America's top blood collection organizations, such as the American Red Cross, asked the FDA to reconsider the ban last year, but the FDA reiterated the policy in a Web site posting last month.

The FDA says it is just being zealous about the safety of the U.S. blood supply, as men who've had sex with other men are much more likely than the general population to have HIV-AIDS. All donated blood is tested twice. However, according to FDA experts, the majority of HIV-infected blood transfusions, which occur about 12 times per year, are not attributable to false negatives on these tests. They happen because of human or computer error, such as when personnel accidentally use the wrong donation. The FDA says that allowing men who've had gay sex to donate blood would increase the number of accidental transfusions of HIV-infected blood, even if testing is supposed to weed out tainted blood.

Yet this donation policy is considerably stricter than that for at-risk heterosexual groups: A heterosexual who has had sex with a known carrier of HIV, for example, must wait just a year before being able to donate blood. And so, despite the FDA's protestations, the appearance of prejudice persists. Each year, healthy gay men are turned away, and college and high school campuses around the country cancel blood drives to avoid endorsing an event that appears discriminatory. This modestly threatens local blood supply in the short term and may prevent youths nationwide from developing the habit of giving blood in the long term, as 85 percent of donations come from repeat donors.

The FDA should not do anything to jeopardize the safety of the U.S. blood supply. But the agency appears to have no evidence to justify its differential treatment of at-risk categories.