F.D.A.: Celibate Gays Can Donate Blood
The Food and Drug Administration is lifting its 31-year ban on blood donation from men who sleep with men. But don't get all excited and gay about it, gays.
The ban was enacted in 1983, during the early "plague years" of AIDS, and now it's changing except not really very much at all. The New York Times reports:
But science — and the understanding of H.I.V. in particular — has advanced in the intervening decades, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. acknowledged as much, lifting the lifetime ban but keeping in place a more modest block on donations by men who have had sex with other men in the last 12 months.
Hear that, guys? Refrain from having sex for a year and then you can sit in a chair and someone will sap the blood from your veins. What a worthwhile trade-off.
Great Britain, the Times notes, has a similar one-year restriction. My doctor tells me it generally takes a few weeks for HIV to be detectable in blood after contracting it.
The F.D.A., like many Americans, "likes" gays, but not when they act gay.
