I was told by a doctor that HIV can possibly hide in your bone marrow for 10 years (hence the strictness). Most times they dont tell you that. Also, blood donar places screen blood for hiv immediately and through other faster ways than the typical 3 month window by testing for a particular antigen, not the anti-bodies. So it shows up sooner.

I'll come back to this with a response as soon as I've thought it through properly

Quote from: Evie on 28 January 2009, 08:15:22 pm

I'll come back to this with a response as soon as I've thought it through properly

you mean, once you research to find out whether its fuckery or not 

It sounds odd I mean the 'hiding' in bone marrow thing. I'll come back to that one

Wouldnt it have to travel through the blood to get to the bone marow??

 I'm trying to determine if it is another US gov attempt at getting people to abstain:) I remember being told all marijuana sales funds Al Qaeda and a single pill of E will kill you. The Catholics love HPV, as condoms don't protect from that one they have the 'Sleep with your boyfriend after the prom and get cancer' ideas.  Ahhh, misinformation

Its also something everyone who knows me knows im quite passionate about so i dont really know what i will say if i get asked about it.  What reasons could you give for giving up donating blood?

You get disqualified for a year for having sex with various people. Sex workers, men who've ever engaged in any kind of gay sex, or people from high-risk countries. Could you tell your friends you'd been shagging a guy who sucked a cock once? Or you could disqualify yourself with a holiday to Africa!

Thought I should bump this thread as this just came to my attention when browsing the interwebs and reading about the MSM (men who have sex with men) blood donation controversy. Needless to say, I consider a lifetime ban (for both MSM and us sports) ridiculously strict - and particularly the fact that it discrimates in a blanket way across an entire group without paying any respect to any particular variation that exists within that group, or any other pockets of society that may be of a similar risk.

No specific questions are asked in the questionaire about risky sexual practises or estimated number of sexual partners - they appear to be simply lumped in as a priori assumptions of the two specific sexual "risk groups", and left at that. And even at that, escorts are lumped in with streetwalkers, who are doubtless a far higher risk subset of the "prostitute" group.

I mean, there don't appear to be any explicit bars from what I can see on heterosexual men, or women of any sexual orientation, who have or have had multiple sexual partners, perhaps in parallel, and perhaps indulged in risky practices, from giving blood - at least certainly not permanently. Only it seems if it was done for some kind of payment...

On the other hand - I suppose I could just play the semantic trick and say that I was paid for time and companionship, rather than specifically for sex - with sex being discretionary.

On the other other hand, I hope that in the future when they are reviewing the current guidelines on the MSM issue, that they will also review their guidelines with respect to us guys, and potentially reduce the frankly idiotic life ban.

I don't expect the Blood Service to ever come out and say so, but I suspect a major reason for the bans on MSM ('men who have sex with men') etc isn't so much the individual risk of them having HIV or Hep, but the near certainty that those will be the groups where the next blood-borne nasty will turn up first.

In the late 1970s, lots of gay men in San Francisco were involved in a Hepatitis B vaccine trial, and their blood was stored. After Aids was discovered up and HIV tests were invented, the 1970s blood was looked at again and showed horrific levels of HIV infection years before anyone suspected it existed.

Even if society continues to get more tolerant, can you imagine a majority of people thinking "NBS now accepting blood from people who've had sex for money or drugs" is a good thing?

Oh yeah, but of course, I mean your blood is automatically tainted for life the minute money changes hands and you start getting jiggy. You can be promiscuous all you like, but don't dare make any kind of financial gain from it?

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