New FDA guidelines allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – New FDA guidelines on blood donation will allow gay and bisexual men to donate blood for the first time in 40 years.

The new guidelines are based on decades of research and testing says Blood Assurance physician Liz Culler. One of the biggest changes is the use of uniform questioning that all donors will be asked regardless of their outwardly presenting gender identity. This is because we now know that HIV can affect anyone, not just gay men.

“These questions were started in the middle of the 1980s when people didn’t really understand how HIV was transmitted. And so males who had sex as males were indefinitely deferred from donating blood. And over the next few decades, testing got increasingly better and better. And so we could detect any new infections. And so that deferral period was reduced to one year and then finally, more recently to three months,” Culler said.

This reduction of a deferral period may encourage more people to donate blood. People like Del Zimmerman who also works with Blood Assurance. Zimmerman grew up during the AIDS scare in the eighties and sees these new guidelines as a great step in the right direction.

“The feeling is it is excitement. And I think that there’s some relief in there and the you know, the excitement certainly stems from just knowing that this is inching just a little bit farther toward equality. I mean, in so many areas of life, we still have so many so so many ways to go. But at least this is one thing, you know, one thing that is now being seen as more, more equitable,” Zimmerman said.

For many, this will enable them to donate blood and take part in what ,many consider to be a public service for the first time in their lives. It also removes another place where discrimination can prevent people from performing a public service and it see science taking action against a great deal of misinformation that has been spread about HIV/AIDS for decades.