‘We have the same blood as you’ | Emerging study works to eliminate blood ban for gay, bisexual men – 11Alive.com WXIA

For decades, gay and bisexual men have been banned from donating blood in some capacity, preventing them from contributing to alleviate blood shortages or helping a wounded friend.

“I think the ban has a history that becomes hard to discard,” Dr. Melanie Thompson, co-chair of the HIV Medicine Association, said.

Medical experts have said it’s a history tainted with bias, as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned men who have sex with men from blood donation since the height of the AIDS epidemic.

“Back in the 80s, when the HIV crisis first broke, there was a lot of blood that was tainted with HIV,” Dr. Claudia Cohn, chief medical officer of the Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies (AABB), said. “The risk at that time, in the early 80s, was somewhere around 1 in 100.”

Cohn said that ratio has decreased exponentially, with the risk of contracting an infectious disease through blood now somewhere within the range of 1 in 2 million.

As research, treatments, testing and detection advance, new HIV infections reduced globally since its peak in 1997 by 52%, according to 2021 research from The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).

People continued to die from HIV throughout the 80s with mortality peaking in 1995. A Kaiser Family Foundation study shows those rates have decreased by more than 80% in the last three decades.

“As we have learned more and more about HIV, as we have learned more and more about diagnostics to detect HIV, the science of blood donor screening hasn’t kept up,” Thompson said.

Now, decades since the initial ban was implemented, restrictions and celibacy requirements for gay and bisexual men still remain.