Thicker Than Water
The gay rights group Rainbow Wellington is taking the New Zealand Blood Service to the Human Rights Commission over the restrictions on sexually active homosexual men giving blood. Frankly, I think this is a stupid waste of the scarce resources of the New Zealand Blood Service, who can ill afford HRC lawyers. It is an absurd waste of time and money and is almost certainly just a wasteful publicity stunt. No-0ne has a “right” to give blood. Such a thought is ridiculous. There is also no evidence at all of discrimination in the sense that the HRC would be interested in. Male homosexuals are restricted in their ability to donate blood products on good clinical grounds. The very fact that only male homosexuals are restricted should tell you that this is not discrimination against sexual orientation.
The HIV rate in male homosexuals is 40 times the rate in the general population. It is for this reason that a deferral period is used. Gay men can donate blood, but only if they have not had sex with another man for at least five years (it was 10 until last year). In the US (where the HIV rate is very high) Gay men are treated in the same way as IV drug users – they are banned for life. I’m not certain of the logic of this but it may have something to do with availability of supply and risk. As I have pointed out in a previous post here, if the supply of blood is plentiful, there is no need to take even the slightest risk with contamination. In New Zealand, the supply of blood is variable, and a small level of risk is warranted.
Australia is in a similar position to New Zealand and they have a deferral period of one year. I think this is probably more reasonable than five and I would certainly be supportive of a change to one year. There are two main reasons for this. Firstly most HIV infections are detectable at 3 months; some are only detectable at 6 months but virtually 100% are detectable at 1 year. Considering the small numbers of gay donors likely to contribute in New Zealand, that less than a 1 in a million risk becomes vanishingly small.
The second reason I am in favor of a one year deferral is that it is far more likely to be achievable for male homosexuals. There is a potential danger of some gays not telling the truth about their sexual activities (or genuinely not remembering) and this potential is reduced with a one year deferral. (note: this suggestion of possible dishonesty is not particular to homosexuals, of course. It extends to IV drug users and potential “mad cow” victims as well.)
Rainbow Wellington, however, is not pushing for a reduction of the deferral period, but a complete elimination of it. Gay lobbyists point to Italy and Spain, who have no deferral periods for gays at all and whose HIV infection rates from blood are steadily falling. This is a little disingenuous as the HIV rates in these countries are much higher than in New Zealand, especially their heterosexual HIV rate. Therefore their policies are, in fact, much stricter all round and involve extensive testing of the blood and detailed sexual histories. New Zealand has actually a much more relaxed policy, in comparison. Our screening process is fairly basic and kept this way by our deferral policies. There is a good paper on this topic done by the AIDS foundation that can be accessed here (PDF).
The only consequence of the removal of the deferral period completely will be a much stricter and more complex donation process for everyone and a likely increase in the cost of blood per unit. This is all so the gay lobby can score another point in its radical “normalization” agenda. And make no mistake, this litigation in the HRC is likely to be driven from overseas by gay groups that have a vested interest in seeing New Zealand become a “test case” to strengthen their hand in the US and the UK.
I have absolutely no problem with gay men donating blood. I would happily join with gay lobbyists to push for a one year deferral. But Rainbow Wellington does not appear to be looking for a reasonable compromise that is medically sound, but one that is politically advantaged.
The MacDoctor draws your attention to the byline of his blog. Lobbyists take note.
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Dec 3 09 12:36 am
Do the blood donors get paid? Perhaps there is a financial angle to this trouble.
AFAIK, donors only get paid for blood in the US.
Dec 3 09 7:40 am
This is pathetic and the Human Rights Commision should tell them to fuck off – but that is probably worthy of a HRC complaint. I lived in Britain in the 1980s and because I comsumed British beef, I cannot give blood either in canse I have CJD. My right to give blood must be upheld. Could you pass me the name of the Gay Blood Donor’s lawyer. He may want to take the case on for all of us middle-aged Kiwis who inadvertantly did our OE in the 80s and 90s.
Dec 3 09 8:53 am
I’m perfectly healthy, am in a steady, long-term relationship, and went to give blood earlier this year. Turns out, that I couldn’t, because I had a corneal graft in 2002. Because they can’t rule out the *possiblity* of my donor having lived in the UK, I cannot donate, ever. Even the lady performing the interview was stunned. They take this screening rather seriously – although it’s a little perturbing they’re not so worried about donor tissue. But again, that’d be supply vs risk.
Dec 3 09 10:26 am
When I was in South Africa for a few weeks in 2005 there was a bit of a barney going on about gay men donating blood. They pointed out that the highest risk group there for HIV was young adult black women. (The suggestion that young black women should be excluded from giving blood would be pretty explosive in South Africa, I should think!)
As MacDoctor says, New Zealand has its own risk profiles and its own supply considerations and needs to come up with its own criteria and policies. The “right to give blood” should be given very little, if any, weight.
And as a regular donor, I would not be happy with anything that made the procedure more cumbersome for me.
Dec 3 09 10:53 am
Heck, I got turned down for having a stomach ache.
This is like Arabs complaining about being profiled on El Al – this is a risk you just can’t ignore, no matter how small.
.-= scrubone´s last blog ..News: Former reality show contestant just happens to be caught up in scandal! =-.
Dec 3 09 11:35 am
Insanity!
Dec 3 09 6:49 pm
Insanity Lucy? – Quite possibly but it is most certainly an own goal in that it just reminds everybody that the Gay lifestyle spreads the so called “social diseases”.
.-= Andrei´s last blog ..Baying mobs at Kiwiblog sign of things to come [UPDATE] =-.
Dec 3 09 8:47 pm
This is a waste of space. The reasons are around risk, and Gay men are not the only group singled out. I have not been able to give blood since a corneal transplant 25 years ago because of risk I might have prion (a type of infection, for the non medics) and develop CJD or a variant.
I would be selfish to demand to donate.
.-= pukeko´s last blog ..Someone does not get it. =-.
Dec 4 09 9:40 am
MacDoctor, where did you get the HIV rate in male homosexuals being 40 times the rate in the general population? Are you aware of the case in Canada in the early 80’s where over a thousand Canadians becoming infected with HIV because the Canadian Red Cross caved in to homosexual lobbyist and allowed homosexuals to donate blood?
Blood donation is for the recipient not to make some so called oppressed group feel good about themselves.
There can be mistakes in screening. Surely it makes sense to use exclusion as an extra means of protecting the recipient.
Dec 4 09 10:04 am
No no no Chuck that is a highly inaccurate rendition of the Canadian Blood scandal.
This actually occurred in the early eighties before HIV had been identified and the majority of victims of the tainted blood products contracted hepatitis C not HIV. although the effects didn’t become apparent until much later.
HIV makes for sexier headlines especially when you want to crucify health services so thats the angle that is always taken.
People with agendas are the bane of good science and we need to correct rather than perpetuate myths whenever we spot it.
In fact I would go so far as to suggest that the reason why HIV is a problem that has thus far remained intractable to medical science is because it is an area that has become polluted by people with agendas.
.-= Andrei´s last blog ..And It Was All Yellow…. =-.
Dec 4 09 11:45 am
Andrei, please check the following link.
http://www.mapleleafweb.com/old/education/spotlight/issue_60/scandal.html
I will cut and paste at the end of this post from an article I have from the Alberta Report which is no longer online. The name of the article is “Bureaucratic serial killers”.
Are you contending that this article is untrue? If you wish I can email you the whole article.
“Krever’s tainted-blood inquiry lays bare in meticulous detail the heavy death toll from political correctness
In the summer of 1983, Dr. Thomas Bowen, medical director of Calgary’s Red Cross Blood Centre, was ordered by the national Red Cross office not to mark blood donations from people suspected of being gay, intravenous drug users, or otherwise at a high risk of contracting AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome). Nevertheless, for two years Calgary nurses put a black dot on suspect samples so that they were not used for transfusions. Dr. Bowen did not tell the national office this, because senior Red Cross bureaucrats were committed to a policy of “voluntary self-exclusion” and Dr. Bowen did not want to be told to stop doing it.
Nobody knows how many lives Dr. Bowen saved by this expedient. After testifying at the Commission of Inquiry on the Blood System in Canada, Dr. Bowen said that it was just “luck” that he took appropriate steps while the Red Cross did not. But the head of the commission, Justice Horace Krever, disagrees. In his report, released November 26, Mr. Justice Krever maps out with devastating precision exactly how and why the guardians of Canada’s blood supply let thousands of people die unnecessarily through inaction, cowardice, bureaucratic bungling and lies.
The report details how top Red Cross bureaucrats refused to properly screen donors because they were afraid of offending the gay community and the public; how they publicly insisted that the risk of transmitting AIDS by blood transfusion was “overrated,” while privately acknowledging that contamination of the supply was only a matter of time; how they frittered away an 18-month opportunity between 1983 and 1985 to implement AIDS prevention measures already in place in the U.S.; and how they later distributed blood products to hemophiliacs that they should have known to be contaminated.
Other factors contributed to the debacle, such as political infighting between the Red Cross and federal and provincial agencies. Neither Ottawa nor the provinces did anything to stop the medical malfeasance, and as a result over 1,100 Canadians got AIDS and over 60,000 were infected with hepatitis C. But the “primary responsibility” for preventing such a catastrophe was in the hands of one entity: the Canadian Red Cross.”
Dec 4 09 2:24 pm
Chuck
(1) Using human blood products is inherently risky – today the risks are lower but they still remain
(2) The Canadian Red Cross did not have enough blood to meet the demand and much of the contaminated blood was imported from the United States
(3) The suppliers of the blood were contractually bound not to collect it in high risk areas, terms they violated and some of the blood was found to have been collected in California Prisons.
(4) It was been suggested (in the Krever report) that the donor screening procedures in the USA led the suppliers to dump blood products they could no longer use in the USA in Canada.
All of which was a terrible tragedy coupled with some wrong doing no doubt but it has also been distorted – by people with axes to grind and dare I say it by people seeking large sums compensation – some of whom probably have a good case and others who will be just riding the gravy train
.-= Andrei´s last blog ..And It Was All Yellow…. =-.
Dec 5 09 1:16 pm
I am now on the active list for a lung transplant. From a strictly selfish point of view I sincerely hope they continue robust screening and Rainbow Wellington can go to hell.