Homosexual men should be allowed to donate blood

Now I'll go over some key points. The HIV/AIDS statistic may be misleading since most people who have HIV don't know they have it. Also, due to the fact that researchers at first thought that HIV was the "gay disease" homosexual men are more cautious and more likely to get tested, thus they contribute more to the statistic. However, many heterosexuals live in denial of the disease still or many times are just ignorant as to how non-discriminatory the HIV can be. You are right that donating blood is for the help of individuals, but denying clean blood does not help those individuals. . http://www.bnl.gov... That article shows the demand for blood, and I know the FDA is trying to be precautions but there precautions are not necessary. I say this because the same problems a homosexual donor have are ones a heterosexual donor may have, so the end all be all should not be whether or not one has sex w/ men, but we need to rely on the tests themselves. You told a story of a man who got infected because another man decided to lie about having sex w/ men. However this situation could have been prevented if a better test was done, and if a heterosexual person had the virus and the test went awry, the same event would have occurred. Also, it has also been shown that African Americans, and more specifically African American women also are at huge risks of having and contracting HIV/AIDS. However, barring these people from donating blood is not logical, because each of them can be tested with great accuracy like you said, and denying them is denying a patient the blood he or she needs. I do understand the need to filter things and counting risk behaviors is one of them however, many risk behaviors are far too widespread so it becomes discriminatory when only one group is targeted for this risk behavior. I understand that needle injecting is a risk behavior, that only drug addicts or other drug users would partake in (for the most part). However, another risk behavior that can contaminate blood is not men on men sex, but sex as a whole. The FDA only recognizes homosexual sex as a risk behavior, but they should acknowledge that anyone who has sex is putting themselves at risk. Also, since many of these questions can be easily lied about, why not ask the questions that make more of a difference. Have you ever had sex without a condom. A homosexual man who has had sex w/ a condom is at far less risk then any heterosexual who hasn't. I guess the basis of my argument is that the FDA may have good intentions but are not filtering sexual risks the correct and most effective way. If their going to bar off people from donating blood because of sex related things, then they should ask questions that are more directly linked to blood tainting diseases. Homosexuality is not one of these things. Homosexuals may be statistically higher carriers but we have to look at what can affect these statistics, . http://www.cdc.gov... and at the end of the day most people don't even know they have HIV. My fear is that we may be filtering out more clean blood then tainted blood. Mistakes can happen, but they can also happen with anybody. Just because you filtered the gay men who were not virgins does not mean that a heterosexual still can't pass along the virus. So what is important here is the blood tests, since that's the only true determining factor of the safety of someone's blood. But if we must filter out people for unsafe behavior the FDA should filter out the behaviors that are more risky, like the needle sharing and travelling you listed, but instead of filtering out an entire group of people let's filter out an unsafe behavior (I know they target gay sex and not gay people, but that would mean the homosexual would have to be a virgin so most homosexuals would still be singled out). My final point is unsafe sex puts people at risk for blood contaminating diseases not homosexual sex. Whether homosexual or heterosexual unsafe sex greatly increases the chance of contracting a disease, and if a condom is used correctly and doesn't bust then the chance for someone whether homosexual or heterosexual contracting an STD is close to 0. These are the questions that matter, who the person has sex with doesn't matter as much as how safe was the sex. . http://www.advocatesforyouth.org... . http://www.cdc.gov... (please give this a quick look and you'll notice that what you said about men having sex with men is similar to what statistics show about black women, point being we can't let that stop them from donating blood)