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MacRumors Blood Drive

MacinDoc said:
What evidence do you have that hysteria is trumping science? Statistically speaking, the probability is higher that a male homosexual donor, a person with multiple sexual partners, a prostitite, a drug user, or a donor who lived an an area where HIV is endemic will have HIV. Since the sensitivity of the HIV test is not 100%, and because there can also be a delay between exposure and positive test results, the risk of HIV transmission from donors in these populations is, by definition, higher. This is no comment on the suitability of individual donors, just an application of epidemiology and statistical probability.

In Canada, the Red Cross no longer supplies blood due to its past failure to pay attention to/alleged covering up of information that showed that recipients were potentially at risk and that some patients had been infected as a result of transfusions. To some extent, these agencies are attempting to mitigate the risk of legal action being taken against them, much in the same way as some insurance companies decline to insure some patients due to their demographics and previous history. Certainly far from perfect, but each organization must decide which risks it is prepared to take.
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Thank you!

djzapp said:
And please dont pick a Christian research group that will make the results what ever they want to make the "Gay community look bad.
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Religion has nothing to do with it.

p.s. Will be donating, donate every chance I get. Just have to find time to do it now. Love the Red Cross rules simply because it's a safeguard that may inconvenience some, but saves so many for possible trouble.
 
djzapp said:
...but come on Str8 people sleep around just as much if not more.
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Exactly - the issue is promiscuity, not sexual identity.

But, as a gay male, I want to work on DADT and DOMA and other issues - once we win on those topics the little things like the Red Cross's aniquated attitudes will fall away.

Watch Modern Family for a few episodes, and tell me which couple is the most like Ozzie and Harriett!
 
miniroll32 said:
Original Post quotes:

"Our goal is to increase the number of blood donations by people in the Mac community."

Do 'Mac-people' have some sort of special blood?
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I doubt that Mac people have different blood than other computer users.

However, if MacRumors readers have had less sexual activity than the general population, they might be an interesting donor pool. Fewer high-risk activities probably result in fewer deferrals, and thus result in more donations.

Also, blood banks *love* CMV-negative donors. My local blood bank is constantly pestering me to donate.
 
In case you are wondering what "the Mac community" means, it's our expression for the people who visit this site as well as anyone who uses Apple products. A lot of them don't even own Macintoshes, but the name has stuck.
 
Can't. Too homo to give blood. Guess I'll have to keep all this lovely O+ to myself.

People object to racial profiling, but not sexual orientation profiling, apparently. Why don't we run some stats on which race has a higher predisposition for HIV infections and ban whichever race that is? Let me guess why they don't do that - there'd be mass outrage that they are profiling. :sigh:

Also, don't bother mentioning that you might revise the policy to allow anyone who hasn't slept with a man in a year... it won't make anyone feel better.
 
mousouchop said:
...Can't you just, say you're straight? You aren't putting anyone at risk, regardless of what closed minded bigots think. :confused:
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I agonize over this, as a safe, regularly tested, nearly abstinent (unfortunately!) gay man. But when it comes down to it, it feels so repugnant to me to be forced to lie in response to the screening question, that I sadly decline to donate on deceitful terms. Maybe if attitudes in society had come around sufficiently that sexual orientation were a totally mundane characteristic like preferring vanilla to strawberry, I wouldn't mind lying about it to get blood to those who need it (as I know some others do). But as it is, it just feels like to do so would be insulting to myself and other gay men. Irrational, perhaps, but it's an emotional issue.

Especially for me, since I used to love donating in college! I had "blood buddies" I'd go with every time the Red Cross came through campus. You get such a good feeling out of it, and the discomfort is mild to non-existent. Every eligible person who doesn't do it had better have a really good excuse.

Personally, I understand using epidemiological statistics to determine screening criteria that necessarily exclude some safe donors... however, it's kind of insulting that the screening excludes ALL sexually active gay men while not even asking about how many unprotected sex partners straight people have had, for example (at least this is how I remember it from the last time I tried to donate). There's no solid statistical backing for excluding abstinent or monogamous men who've previously received multiple negative HIV test results.
 
iOrlando said:
Mental health and psychology are great ways of giving back to the world. I rarely give donations in the form of money to charities. I highly distrust how charities are run and where that money goes. I instead donate time and objects (clothes etc).
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Donating time and materials is a decent way to help certain local causes and organizations, but monetary gifts are a far more efficient way to help big causes that have big budgets and specialized staff. For example, cancer research funding has absolutely no use for your time nor your stuff, but your donation can be used by them for anything they need. Natural disaster relief efforts are mostly hindered by lay volunteers and by material donations, because volunteers get in the way and need food and water themselves, and their material donations require very inefficient infrastructure to collect, transport, and deliver. Economies of scale mean that your $10 donation is vastly more useful for the relief effort than $10 worth of goods, or multiple hours of your time (unless that time is spent convincing your friends to donate money). A cursory amount of internet research can tell you exactly how trustworthy and efficient any charitable organization is, because such things are tracked by numerous independent agencies.

Blood is an important exception to the rule about material donation because there is always local need for it, and money cannot be converted into blood!

iOrlando said:
I dont believe in giving money to educate children how to read. I instead will take part in after-school program where I think that has a much bigger impact than sending a check to some random book charity. I rarely donate money to a dog shelter. I instead have spent time playing with the dogs and just spending time with them.
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You are right that education is an important way to make the world a better place. In fact,you would become a more effectively generous and helpful world citizen by taking courses in logic and economics before you try to convince any more people not to donate blood or money to worthy causes.
 
TigerWoodsIV said:
Who really gave this a negative lol...I mean really?
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This is one of the things that irks me about MacRumors. Before I used to think that you would see "negative" markings on some story that may have another side to it...but I honestly think there are just Apple/Mac haters out there than have some auto-script that just automatically mark every story that comes here as "negative"....no matter what. I mean, who could possibly mark this story as negative? Marking a story about the iPhone 4.0 OS as negative...okay, maybe someone has an issue that isn't addressed in the OS or they think it's not good enough or that something is left out. I get that. But giving blood?

Maybe they should put a feature in here that shows exactly who votes for what. Why keep it anonymous anyway?
 
Great idea

What a great idea, but like some of the members who posted before me, I cannot donate due to being a member of the gay community... such a shame
 
This is one issue I've not made my mind up on. Two of my family are Jehovah's Witnesses (and I'm not - so I really don't credit the religious reasoning behind it). I'm now doing a Phd in Immunology.

Because of this background I've seen decent scientific literature showing appreciably better outcomes (recovery times, relapses, etc) for surgeries performed in such as way so as to avoid transfusion. Even in emergency cases with significant blood loss, alternative strategies such as plasma expanders, cryo-surgeries (body is cooled) and other non-mainstream practices have yielded results at least as good as when real blood is used.

Obviously this is more expensive (or you have to know a specialist involved) and abstaining from blood (like the JWs do) is not currently practical on a population-wide basis, so we need blood transfusion. But it's not like receiving blood is risk free. I actually had to do an autologous blood donation for the 4th in a series of surgeries I had a while back, and though the aneasthetist assured me he used the same protocol I've had in previous several times, this time I received one unit of my own blood back, and then had a really bad reaction... to my own blood.

The problem is that blood is an incredibly complex substance, and matching blood types is just the tip of the iceberg. The donation of blood plasma is (probably) better because removes the immunogenic white blood cells - the mismatching of which cause graft-versus-host-disease (GVHD) in tissue transplants. I understand that receiving processed red blood cells back into the body without the plasma can be a painful procedure though, so that's kinda put me off that.

I accept that there is an imperative to promote blood donation, but I'm not sure where I personally stand on it. I think that artificial blood will eventually be developed, and in the long term, that's the way to go. Basically this reasoning leaves me where I am currently, not donating but unsure where I stand if I had to receive blood. I'd actually be curious to hear Arn's thoughts on this...?
 
A few people have posted about the Red Cross rejecting 'UK' blood due to mad cow disease. Is this really true? I just can't believe it!

I'm donating here in the UK next week for the first time... the NHS will test my blood for HIV, HBV etc. but not variant CJD as far as I know!
 
n-abounds said:
Can't. Too homo to give blood. Guess I'll have to keep all this lovely O+ to myself.

People object to racial profiling, but not sexual orientation profiling, apparently. Why don't we run some stats on which race has a higher predisposition for HIV infections and ban whichever race that is? Let me guess why they don't do that - there'd be mass outrage that they are profiling. :sigh:

Also, don't bother mentioning that you might revise the policy to allow anyone who hasn't slept with a man in a year... it won't make anyone feel better.
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Well, first off it's much harder for people to hid their race. An open gay person is just that, and open gay person, that no one will know is gay until they open their mouths, other than that they are just assuming.

They are already singling out a large group of people simply because of the amount of patients with HIV:

**were born in, or lived in, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea,Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria, since 1977.**

Still on their front page.

It saddens me that there are people so selfish as to think it's a gay rights thing, when from what I am reading it's just about reducing the risks taken by the people that will get the blood. It may be arcane, but they have to take all precautions.
 
MacinDoc said:
...the probability is higher that a male homosexual donor, a person with multiple sexual partners, a prostitite, a drug user, or a donor who lived an an area where HIV is endemic will have HIV...
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And you've hit the nail on the head. We are lumped with prostitutes and drug users. There's no consideration of behaviour or background. 'Gay' is the behaviour itself. That's why current policies against gay men are pure homophobia. By far the huge majority of gay men are HIV negative. And there are - many times over - more straight people worldwide who have HIV who wouldn't get stopped donating blood through arbitrary policies like this.

Digital Skunk said:
They are already singling out a large group of people simply because of the amount of patients with HIV:
**were born in, or lived in, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea,Gabon, Niger, or Nigeria, since 1977.**

...It saddens me that there are people so selfish as to think it's a gay rights thing ... It may be arcane, but they have to take all precautions.
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HIV is SO prevalent in Africa that there is much more justification for there to be an outright ban on all Africans donating blood. For example, an estimated 11% of South Africans are apparently living with HIV (according to AVERT). Of course banning ALL Africans would be just as stupid as the gay ban but, because there is more sensitivity to racial issues, sweeping policies like this would never be enacted. Rightly so. But there should similarly not be sweeping policies about gay men donating.

If they invested a bit more effort in screening the blood in the first place, then everybody wins. More people could donate. There would be more blood available. More people's lives would be saved. Fewer people would risk infection from poorly screened blood transfusions.
 
sibruk said:
HIV is SO prevalent in Africa that there is much more justification for there to be an outright ban on all Africans donating blood. For example, an estimated 11% of South Africans are apparently living with HIV (according to AVERT). Of course banning ALL Africans would be just as stupid as the gay ban but, because there is more sensitivity to racial issues, sweeping policies like this would never be enacted. Rightly so. But there should similarly not be sweeping policies about gay men donating.

If they invested a bit more effort in screening the blood in the first place, then everybody wins. More people could donate. There would be more blood available. More people's lives would be saved. Fewer people would risk infection from poorly screened blood transfusions.
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I agree 100%.

Just want to make sure everyone knows that there IS a ban on anyone born in or that has spent time in West Africa as well. It's not just gay men.
 
Well done, Macrumors.

I had a great and very non-promiscuous friend who, a few months after coming out, told me that he'd donated blood by simply lying on the screening form. I'm glad he was able to help/save someone's life, although I'm worried that the form will encourage people to lie on some of the more pertinent questions.

If you're not doing sufficiently reliable and quick HIV testing, NHS, how can I be sure that I'm not accidentally passing HIV to someone through recent infection? I'm not promiscuous either, you see, but neither was my friend, so I'm not sure how our behaviours are different. And the supposedly more risky anal sex doesn't require one to be gay to practice.
 
I found an interesting article about the incentives (prizes) that are sometimes offered to blood donors.

The World Health Organization has encouraged its members to move toward completely voluntary unpaid blood donations, because offering payment for blood donation can lead people who shouldn't be donating to give false information to earn money. Some developing countries found that policy hard to implement because they were already struggling to find enough donors, but there's been much progress toward the goal.

However, the article questions even the non-cash incentives offered by many donation centers. In 2008 or 2009 they gave me a free T-shirt promoting blood donation for donating blood, and it seemed like good advertising. But I was surprised to discover that the American Red Cross has a full-fledged rewards program for blood donors. Baskin-Robbins, the ice cream maker, has a "Pint for Pint" program in the western U.S. to give free ice cream to blood donors. I'm sure there are lots more of these incentive programs. I just didn't realize they might be controversial.

Do these types of incentives encourage you and others to donate, or do you think they are an unfortunate trend?
 
A great initiative!! I already give blood for 16 years. When I was 15 I already wanted to donate but of course I had to wait.

Anybody who is doubting wether they should donate or not: it's not scary at all and it isn't painful at all. The people who pinch you for blood donation are true masters of inserting the needle! You will feel less then normal. In about 10 minutes it's done. After that a cup of coffee and all done!!!!

So nothing to be scared about and you can save a lot of lives like this. In 24 hours the volume of the blood is back to normal. So what's the problem?

So leave your mac for a hour and pick up your iPhone and go give!

Good luck to all of you who go for the first time...
 
Our next miletones (25 units of blood and 10 units of platelets) are within reach.

Please keep up the good work and keep spreading the word about the need for blood donations.
 
Well it looks like they are rethinking the outright ban on gay blood donors: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37599992/ns/health-aids/

But it looks like those of us Americans who've spent a not-insignificant amount of time in the UK are still considered somehow "unfit" for blood donation.

What kills me is when they use phrases like "scientifically unwarranted" but at the same time they continually and willingly subscribe to the Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease hysteria despite all overwhelming scientific evidence that CJD has never been transmitted through a blood transfusion (and can't be).

I still say the Red Cross and their ilk deserve your scorn more than they deserve your money. That's just my opinion; everyone should develop their own take on this and act accordingly.

FWIW, I loved the United Kingdom and Ireland and wouldn't trade my time there for any amount of time in a Red Cross bloodmobile.
 
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