WASHINGTON (H24N) – A government panel of scientists has narrowly upheld a 15-year-old Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy banning gay men from donating blood, prompting accusations of discrimination from some gay rights advocates.

The Blood Products Advisory Committee (BPAC) was asked to consider modifying the policy, which bans donations from any male who admits to having had sex with another male since 1977, in favor of a new regulation that would only ban donations from those who have had same-sex relations in the last five years. After much deliberation the panel rejected the concept by a 7-to-6 vote.

The 1985 policy was put in place to decrease the chance of HIV-infected blood from entering the nation’s blood supply. Yesterday the BPAC said that changing the policy would result in an as many as 62,300 extra donors from the gay population. From that donation pool the panel claimed 1.7 units of HIV-infected blood could make it through the screening process. Right now researchers say only about 10 such units go undetected out of 12 million units donated annually.

With blood shortages reaching critical levels, many local blood banks have been lobbying for a policy change, especially with the advent of much more sophisticated genetic testing of all samples donated. But Rebecca Haley, interim chief medical officer for the American Red Cross, says accepting blood from active gay males still presents "an unacceptable risk" of introducing HIV-positive blood into the national blood supply.

Adrienne Smith, a doctor with the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, disputes that notion. She’s among many medical professionals, gay and straight, who say the policy stigmatizes gay men, and holds them to a different standard from the standard for heterosexual donors, whose own sexual history may be questionable. "Like risks should be treated alike," Smith told the panel yesterday before the vote.

Anyone wishing to donate blood must undergo a screening process, consisting of basic questions about health and habits. One question male donors have to answer involves their same-sex activity since 1977; other questions center on involvement with other activities health officials consider high risk, like intravenous drug use. Any affirmative answer to basic qualifying questions means donations will not be allowed.

But officials don’t rely solely on a respondent’s honesty. All blood donations are tested for HIV and other infectious diseases. For years blood banks used an antibody test to detect HIV, but that system had major holes in it. In some people those antibodies don’t show up until more than a month and a half after exposure. Last year most blood banks began using a new test that can detect tiny amounts of HIV before the donor’s body has even generated those antibodies, sometimes in as short a period as 11 days. Since all donations are tested, many question whether the policy is really based on science, or on political considerations.

The FDA took a public relations beating in the first few years of the AIDS epidemic; many said the agency was moving too slowly in taking action to protect the nation’s blood supply. In the 1980s HIV-tainted blood units resulted in thousands of AIDS cases among blood product recipients, most notably hemophiliacs.

But the new tests, some claim, render those considerations virtually obsolete. "It’s ridiculous now to make the assumption that someone’s a risk based purely on their sexual orientation, " said Theo Hodge, an internal medicine and infectious disease specialist in Washington, D.C. "The possibility of gay men donating HIV-infected blood, and that blood making it through the screening process, isn’t significantly higher than you’d see from the heterosexual population, especially with the tests we have now."

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