According to the Village Voice:
Saturday, Anthony Weiner joined 18 Senators who sent an open letter to the FDA this week demanding that the "medically and scientifically unwarranted" lifetime ban on blood donations from men who have sex with men be done away with.
Weiner said that overturning the ban, which was put in place in 1983, would save lives in the face of a dangerously low local blood supply. According to the New York Blood Center, 1,500 expected donations of blood and platelets were lost when the recent snowstorms forced the cancellation of school and workplace blood drives.
The Senators who wrote to the FDA pointed out that the lifetime ban on donations from men who have had a single same-sex partner since 1977 is not supported by the currently available science.
The American Red Cross, America's Blood Centers, and AABB reported before an FDA-sponsored workshop on March 9, 2006 that the ban on men who have had sex with other men (MSM), even once, since 1977 from ever donating blood "is medically and scientifically unwarranted." Then in 2008, the Council on Science and Public Health at the American Medical Association also advocated modifying the lifetime deferral requirement for MSM...
Collecting facilities now screen all donors for history of certain high-risk behaviors, and FDA regulations determine that all donated blood be analyzed by two highly accurate screening tests; one for antibodies to HIV-1/2 and HIV-1 Group O variants, and the other for the actual sequences of the virus using molecular technologies. As a result, the blood banking community believes that the lifetime deferral is no longer necessary to protect the integrity of the blood banks.
The letter was also signed by Democrats Dick Durbin, Daniel Akaka, Sheldon Whitehouse, Sherrod Brown, Bob Casey, Russ Feingold, Mark Udall, Al Franken, Maria Cantwell, Carl Levin, Tom Harkin, Mark Begich, Rolland Burris, and Michael Bennet, as well as Vermont Independent Bernie Sanders.
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