Homosexual men should be allowed to donate blood

To be more judicious than my opponent, let it be noted that I did attempt to distill the arguments of his latter round. Rather than assume some wanting clarity on my opponent's part, let's just say I must have missed his well articulated case for an alternative method of filtering. What is his proposed method? Well, why not filter out those who have unprotected sex?That's the argument. Apparently filtering out MSM is an ineffective method, though were not shown how or why. Instead, the most effective method would be to filter out groups of people who engaged in unprotected sex. Let us at this point note a few very important things about my opponent's argument. (1) He as merely asserted his case without showing anything by way of poll, statistics or any data at all that would serve to confirm his argument. (2) Asserting an argument without any evidence and then demanding that I prove it wrong is an exceptionally poor way of trying to fulfill burden of proof. (3) Even the dataless assertion that we ought to filter by the category of unprotected sex is spurious; no, it's something in the realm of worse-than-false. Any man who has sex with a man since 1977 is forbidden from donating blood. Does my opponent intend to argue that instead the filtering question should be, "have you ever had unprotected sex from the time of 1977 until present?" This would bring the donor eligibility level down to a handful of nuns, eunuchs, virgins and the exceptionally rare man who has never once known the true feel of a woman (or man as the case may be) without his latex. No blood donating system could survive such a ridiculously chaste system.Or perhaps he has come to recognize that the statistics regarding MSM are, indeed, accurate, and that perhaps there should be a question that reads, "Are you a man who has had unprotected sex with a man between 1977 until present?" If this is the case, my opponent will have to present us with a cogent case and hopefully some data that shows how this question would successfully screen for and defer high risk donors. I presently see a number of significant problems with it. In a study where researchers analyzed 50 studies from 14 different countries, it was found that there is a 15% failure rate of condoms that result from their misuse. Condoms already have a 2% failure rate if used 100% correctly, which means that through the duration of any sexually active life, it is actually statistically LIKELY that over the course of 100 protected sexual acts at least 2 of them were likely fail in protecting you. But studies actually show that it is not likely that condoms are used 100% correctly, meaning that it is actually likely that 15 out of every 100 protected sexual encounters fail to protect the user and recipient.[1] Thus, with 1/5 of people who have HIV not knowing that they have it, a screening question that asks about protected male anal sex would not effectively filter out those who may have HIV but not know it because they do not know that their protection failed (and if they have had sex 86 times, it is likely to have failed at least once).The FDA has admitted that it would change their policy if there was scientific data showing that a change in policy "would not present a significant and preventable risk to blood recipients." My opponent is welcome to take on the challenge and support his claims with scientific data.[2][1] http://www.webmd.com...[2] http://www.fda.gov...