I asked about this at the blood clinic once. The answer I got was that the questionnaires are really secondary to blood testing, which is done on every donation.
The questionnaires simply
(a) weed out the people who are ineligible and honest about it (and there’s no salient incentive here for people to lie*);
(b) provide extra “risk factor” information on top of the tests.
Note that being gay, or having lived in Africa, are risk factors, but are not considered dealbreakers. Probably both in combination would be a dealbreaker though.
(*The only real incentive to lie here is social pressure, e.g., your whole office is donating and you don’t want your AIDS to be known about, which is controlled by allowing the donor to privately put a “No” barcode sticker on their sign-in form, which blindly disqualifies their blood without identifying them by name to any staff or patients present.)
I can believe such a ban would be ineffective if it was trying to keep people from something they were trying to get.
However, this is about banning people who are trying to give something, and who are presumably concerned with actually helping.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some men who’ve done MSM give blood anyway if they have good reason to think they aren’t infected and especially if they have rare blood types.
However, at least some people are habitually rule-abiding.
This is all hypothetical, though. I don’t know how reliably people obey the rules for blood donation, or how important all the rules are. The whole thing is on the honor system, and there are a lot of restrictions.
I would be surprised if any organization had an official policy on this. It’s not frequently seen at blood donation sites.
Because it’s so easy for people who’ve MSMed to evade the ban. Which makes me wonder why epidemiologists dream it’s so effective.
I asked about this at the blood clinic once. The answer I got was that the questionnaires are really secondary to blood testing, which is done on every donation.
The questionnaires simply
(a) weed out the people who are ineligible and honest about it (and there’s no salient incentive here for people to lie*);
(b) provide extra “risk factor” information on top of the tests.
Note that being gay, or having lived in Africa, are risk factors, but are not considered dealbreakers. Probably both in combination would be a dealbreaker though.
(*The only real incentive to lie here is social pressure, e.g., your whole office is donating and you don’t want your AIDS to be known about, which is controlled by allowing the donor to privately put a “No” barcode sticker on their sign-in form, which blindly disqualifies their blood without identifying them by name to any staff or patients present.)
Thanks for the explanation!
I can believe such a ban would be ineffective if it was trying to keep people from something they were trying to get.
However, this is about banning people who are trying to give something, and who are presumably concerned with actually helping.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some men who’ve done MSM give blood anyway if they have good reason to think they aren’t infected and especially if they have rare blood types.
However, at least some people are habitually rule-abiding.
This is all hypothetical, though. I don’t know how reliably people obey the rules for blood donation, or how important all the rules are. The whole thing is on the honor system, and there are a lot of restrictions.