"Panel To Keep Restrictions On Sodomite Blood"
Post by pandora on Jun 12, 2010, 1:28pm
June 12th, 2010 Posted By Pat Dollard.
Quote:
Washington Times:
Following two days of testimony, a federal panel Friday voted against recommending changes to ease the current blood donation restrictions for gay men, saying more research was needed to help “create a road map forward” for future change.
By a 9-6 vote, members of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Advisory Committee on Blood Safety and Availability agreed to continue the current donor policy which rejects blood donations from any man who has had sex with another man — a category know as “MSM” — even once in the past 33 years.
Gay rights groups and others say the 25-year-old policy is needlessly discriminatory, and the American Red Cross and other blood-collecting groups support a shorter deferral policy, down to as little as 12 months. But blood-user groups lobbied to keep the current policy, saying further research is needed.
The panel’s nonbinding recommendations will be brought to another panel led by Dr. Howard Koh, HHS assistant secretary of health. HHS recommendations will then go through the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulatory process, said Jerry Holmberg, executive secretary for the pa . nel.
It’s up to the FDA to make appropriate guidelines on blood safety, Mr. Holmberg said, adding, “We can’t give you a timeline” for when anything will happen.
In its written recommendations, the panel agreed that the current deferral policies for MSM donors are “suboptimal,” but current research cannot support change to a specific alternative policy. “Therefore, without further evaluation, the committee recommends that the current policy not be changed at the present time.”
The panel then suggested numerous research projects to “create a road map forward,” as one panelist called it.
These included suggestions to study how blood-donor questionnaires might be changed to distinguish low-risk MSM donors and heterosexuals from high-risk ones, and what would happen if donors were pre-screened with a small blood test before they donated blood for human use.
The panel also said it needed to explore what would happen in the massive worldwide distribution of U.S. blood products if the U.S. authorities changed their MSM donor standards. Many countries also ban such donations, raising questions about whether they would accept American blood donations.
Before the vote, Nathan Schaefer of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) urged the panel to end what he called the “very blunt instrument of a total lifetime ban” for gay male blood donors. There is a subset of gay and bisexual men who could be safely admitted into the donor pool, said Sean Cahill, another leader of the New York City-based GMHC.
Whaa? So??!
Re: "Panel To Keep Restrictions On Sodomite Blood"
Post by rocketman on Jun 12, 2010, 2:48pm
"Following two days of testimony, a federal panel Friday voted against recommending changes to ease the current blood donation restrictions for gay men, saying more research was needed to help “create a road map forward” for future change."
Occasionally reason prevails ... Despite the light in the loafers brigade.
.
