Gay bloods

The new blood donation risk assessment is the same for every donor regardless of how they identify.

It follows several other Western countries that have recently dropped bans or eased restrictions including the United Kingdom, France, Greece and the Netherlands.

Van Bibber said when he first heard the FDA was considering making the policy change, he was initially wary, but he was excited when it was made official.

"I was a little leery just because I wanted to know, how are they going to make that change and is it truly going to be inclusive and how are they going to involve everybody?" he said.

Although donations are typically low this time of year because of late summer vacations, experts say the problem is particularly acute because the work-from-home movement has made office blood drives less effective.

Adding gay and bisexual men to the donor pool is likely to increase the blood supply by about 4%, Ehrenfeld said. Amesh Adalja, a spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America, said the policy still doesn't go far enough.

"The guidance and the questions should reflect the state of the art and not be holdovers from an older era where blunt tools were used because they had to be used and now they don't," said Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Current testing is so precise that the only people who might be missed are people who get infected with HIV while taking PrEP medication.

Instead of asking about sexual orientation, the Red Cross now asks any would-be donor to wait three months after having had anal sex with a new or multiple sexual partners.

Dr. This is absolutely the first step to take, and science is going to keep working with us and it's only going to go up from here.'"

Experts said this new policy focuses on individual risk, taking into account that many donors are monogamous, test HIV negative and practice safe sex.

"I think that the individual risk-based assessment now gives us a chance to step away from sort of blanket decisions around the risks related to donation," Miyashita Ochoa said.

At AABB, we believe that the ability to save lives through donation of safe blood products should be open to as many people as possible, irrespective of their sexual orientation or gender identity. His mother, Sheri, suffered a life-threatening medical complication when he was born and needed a blood donation to save her life.

Van Bibber said he grew up understanding the significance of blood donation, especially because his blood type is O-negative and can be used in transfusions for any blood type.

Sheri works for the Red Cross organizing blood drives so his family would donate regularly.

11 of this year, the American Red Cross declared a national blood shortage, stating the blood supply level had dropped nearly 25% since early August.

While blood donations have increased since then, it can take weeks for levels to rebound, the Red Cross said.

More work to be done

Van Bibber said the response from the LGBTQ community has been positive with people coming forward to donate who didn't realize they were now eligible or sharing their own first-time donation experience.

However, he and others say there is more work to be done.

That’s why AABB has led efforts to make blood donation inclusive of non-binary donors and championed the adoption of equitable, science-based individual donor assessment (IDA) processes to determine blood donor eligibility that welcome LGBTQ+ blood donors, strengthen the blood supply and save lives.

FDA Approves Historic Expansion of Donor Eligibility

On May 11, 2023, the Food and Drug Administration issued a final guidance eliminating time-based blood donor deferral periods for gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (MSM) and women who have sex with MSM.

The agency now recommends a new donor screening process that uses individual donor assessment - a donor screening process that uses gender-inclusive, individual donor-based questions for all individuals - to establish eligibility.

AABB is committed to helping the blood community implement the recommendations as quickly as possible.

This page includes information for the public on current policies that apply to MSM, as well as the latest updates on efforts to expand donor eligibility.

Testing could rapidly identify HIV in blood with more than 99% certainty. But until recently Goldstein, the commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, and Ehrenfeld, the president of the American Medical Association, were barred from perhaps the simplest way they could help.

They couldn’t donate their own blood.

Both men are gay, and gay men in America have been banned from blood donations since the mid-1980s.

Back then, it made some scientific sense to keep gay men from donating.

"I just felt like I was finally able to do my part and it's a small thing to do that can make such a big difference."

The new policy is one that public health experts and gay rights activists said had been a long time coming.

Ban on gay and bisexual men donating

In the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, blood donations were not able to screen for HIV, which led to some cases of HIV via transfusion.

The medication, given to prevent infection and to treat people who are infected, keeps viral loads so low that they may be undetectable by screening, Adalja said.

Those taking medications to treat or prevent HIV infection will also be deferred. In 2020, this was shortened to a period of 90 days of abstinence.

Scientists and advocates argued that not having policies that backed science was discriminating.

"I think it's safe to say that the policy was so incredibly blunt," Miyashita Ochoa said.

AABB will continue to update this page as new information becomes available.