Bad Blood: The politics of gay donation
IT TOOK fifteen minutes for Canadian Blood Services to extract each of the roughly one million donations it received last year. My own, though, is taking a while longer. In fact, it’s taking decades.
As a gay man, I am deemed part of a high-risk group, my blood—like that of intravenous drug users and sex workers—considered too dangerous to use. Since 1988, men who tick a box admitting they’ve had sex with a man “even one time” since 1977 have been turned away from blood banks. (Never mind that the blood supply has always been a little gay; one study found that 1 to 2 percent of male donors simply didn’t fess up). Now CBS, with Héma-Québec, is trying to amend the policy that activists for gay health have been calling discriminatory for years. This fall, the not-for-profit is petitioning Health Canada to reduce the ban on gay blood to a five-year deferral, meaning that men who have not had same-sex relations for five years may donate. I hope my fellow homosexuals will forgive me for noting that those men constitute a rare subspecies; the five-year deferral remains, in effect, an all-out ban.
“This is a first step, a first significant shift in practice,” offers Dana Devine, vice-president of medical, science, and research affairs at CBS. The bespectacled fifty-six-year-old walks me briskly through netCAD, a boutique research facility she founded in 2003, near the University of British Columbia, to foster better blood work. She tours the rows of automated extractor machines and refrigerators full of plasma sacks with obvious pride, even while she regrets the state of Canada’s donation policy.
Fear Factor
Why pregnant women may be prone to prejudice
Shen Plum
Human beings may have developed a “behavioural immune system,” according to a study published last year in the journal Association for Psychological Science. The report builds on research by Harvard and UCLA scientists who identified elevated levels of xenophobia and ethnocentrism in pregnant women in their first trimester, when they are most vulnerable to pathogens. One hypothesis for this response is that “in-groups” (those who share similar cultural practices) may have developed an immune defence against geographically or ethnically common diseases. The APS study goes further, suggesting that pregnant women, or anyone else with a strategic bias, may be “erroneously inferring the presence of pathogens where there are none.” This reaction could lay the groundwork for prejudices against the disabled, the obese, and the elderly, as well as different ethnicities—presenting challenges, one presumes, for modern multicultural societies.
Australia and parts of the UK have already instituted one-year deferrals of gay blood donations without endangering their supplies. In June, France’s health minister, Marisol Touraine, stated unequivocally that risk is determined by the number of partners, not the type of partners, a person has, and announced her intention to review the country’s policy. Devine concedes that good science underlies these changes, and then she pauses our tour, sighing a little. “There’s the thing a blood recipient will trust, and there’s the thing the science bears out. And there’s a gap between them.”