Burnt Orange Report

New FDA cootie rules

By Jim Dallas

New FDA rules will ban homosexual and bisexual men from making anonymous donations to sperm banks (Yahoo!):

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US government said it would ban homosexuals from making anonymous donations to sperm banks, in the name of preventing transmittable diseases, in a move swiftly condemned by gay rights groups.

New Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) rules that take effect May 25 require agencies that collect tissues or cells including sperm to ask the donor if he has had sex with men or used injectable drugs in the past five years. If the answer is affirmative in either case no donation is allowed.

The FDA says the rules are just an extension of procedures already in effect for donating blood or organs.

"This new rule was developed with input from many concerned consumers, associations and tissue establishments. In all cases, we carefully considered the comments we received in the proposed rule and made changes in the final rule when the science supported the change," said Acting FDA commissioner Lester Crawford.

But homosexual rights groups slammed the move.

"The FDA guidelines are unscientific. There is a 72 hour test which would provide information as to whether a person was HIV positive, we know that even the International Red Cross accepts blood from men who have sex with men," said Roberta Sklar, spokesperson for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

"This is another instance of the Bush administration ignoring scientific information and putting forth their own agenda to satisfy the extreme right wing conservative voters. It does not take in current scientific findings and recommendations."

I'm not sure the new rules are discriminatory on their face; the consensus in the medical community remains that the majority of men with HIV/AIDS were infected during or after having sex with another man. The CDC estimates that 62% of newly-diagnosed men were exposed in this manner. And while the evidence is not entirely solid, there seems to be cause to believe that this might actually be getting worse. So certainly, it's not unreasonable to believe that this should or would raise red flags.

On the other hand, the same CDC documents suggest that the number of HIV-positive gay men is something like 195,000 in 2002.. Assuming that about 4.6 percent of men are gay or bisexual (the figure obtained by pooling the data from the 1998-2002 General Social Surveys), that would mean that there are approximately 6.2 million gay and bisexual men in America; and hence only about 3.5 percent of gay men are HIV positive. While this remains several orders of magnitude higher than the incidence rate among heterosexual men (approximately 100,000 estimated cases among roughly 130000000 straight men would imply an incidence rate of less than one tenth of one percent) , it must me pointed out that 96 percent of gay men are getting shut out without cause. And note that this figure (96 percent) is almost certainly an underestimate, since my estimate of 4.6 percent being gay is, well, most probably a low-ball estimate (since people DO lie in surveys).

My problem with this ruling is not that the FDA seems to be giving the right answers; it's that they seem to be asking the wrong questions.

Common sense (and science) dictate that the most relevant indicator of HIV infection is not whether the person you're having sex with is a man or a woman. A more relevant question is: how many people have you slept with?

The most relevant question of all would be: do you actually have HIV/AIDS? Of course, that question is already asked -- but not necessarily validated with testing. Which is too bad, because testing is becoming cheaper and more reliable all the time. Blanket-banning whole groups of people is becoming less tenable.

It seems to me that these new guidelines may make a miniscule reduction in the number of donations that slip through the cracks. But there are probably far more effective ways of insuring the safety of sperm (and blood, and organs) which do not smack of insensitivity.

Honestly, If were a blood or tissue recipient, and I had to choose between knowing the FDA was banning gays, or knowing that everything was being tested, I'd feel a lot safer if I knew everything was being tested accurately.

(Thanks to EphemeralNotion)