Our ability to screen blood products for is really excellent right now. But they are still restricting men who have had sex with men within the past three months from donating blood.
In 2015, the ban was changed to one year, meaning a gay man would have to abstain from sexual activity for a full year in order to donate blood.Ĭoinciding with the recent shortages of blood donation, the FDA has changed restrictions from one year to three months. Up until 2015, any man who had had sex with another man was banned from blood donation for life. So, this has evolved a long way, but the US has still maintained a fairly regressive policy that a lot of people believe puts irrational or homophobic restrictions on who could donate blood. We have good tests to diagnose people withĪnd we have sensitive assays to test blood products to make sure they are safe to be given for donation. We’ve obviously come a long way both in terms of our understanding of the epidemiology of and our ability to safely test and screen blood products. When the ban was started, in 1985, blood banks had limited abilities to test blood products, so they banned donations from several groups who were found to have higher rates of HIV disease, including gay men. So can gay men donate blood now? It’s complicatedĬould you explain, in brief, the history behind this restriction and how it came to be?īack in the 1980s, the FDA placed restrictions on blood donations by gay men. Here, Katharine Bar, an assistant professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at Penn with expertise in HIV and general infectious disease care, talks about the issue from a medical standpoint: The new policy-which temporarily revises restrictions to three months-has drawn attention to the controversial decades-long policy, and summoned calls for a permanent lifting of the rules altogether. “For example, a gay man in a monogamous relationship would be at low risk of HIV acquisition, but still be banned from blood donation currently.” The rules previously called for 12 months of abstinence before donation. If you don't think any of the above situations apply, you can use this feedback form to request a review of this block.The FDA announced last month that they were relaxing blood donation restrictions on men who have sex with men. Contact your IT department and let them know that they've gotten banned, and to have them let us know when they've addressed the issue.Īre you browsing GameFAQs from an area that filters all traffic through a single proxy server (like Singapore or Malaysia), or are you on a mobile connection that seems to be randomly blocked every few pages? Then we'll definitely want to look into it - please let us know about it here. You'll need to disable that add-on in order to use GameFAQs.Īre you browsing GameFAQs from work, school, a library, or another shared IP? Unfortunately, if this school or place of business doesn't stop people from abusing our resources, we don't have any other way to put an end to it. When we get more abuse from a single IP address than we do legitimate traffic, we really have no choice but to block it. If you don't think you did anything wrong and don't understand why your IP was banned.Īre you using a proxy server or running a browser add-on for "privacy", "being anonymous", or "changing your region" or to view country-specific content, such as Tor or Zenmate? Unfortunately, so do spammers and hackers. IP bans will be reconsidered on a case-by-case basis if you were running a bot and did not understand the consequences, but typically not for spamming, hacking, or other abuse. If you are responsible for one of the above issues. Having an excessive number of banned accounts in a very short timeframe.Running a web bot/spider that downloaded a very large number of pages - more than could possibly justified as "personal use".Automated spam (advertising) or intrustion attempts (hacking).Your current IP address has been blocked due to bad behavior, which generally means one of the following: