University Says Blood Drive Biased Against Gays

This we hear from FOXNews.com, and moreover it's an original piece with them.

At issue is this question, which I know from my personal experience in giving blood at hundreds of blood drives before, during, and after my career in medicine: "Are you a male who has had sexual relations with any male at any time since 1977?" In fact, the Red Cross goes so far as to ask the would-be donor again, and give him a bar-coded sticker that he can put on his application, behind a privacy screen, stating whether the Red Cross ought to accept his donation or not. He doesn't even have to walk out in front of everybody, or blurt it out, or anything. The Red Cross will even go to the trouble of collecting a unit of blood from him and then throw it out afterwards if he has coded his application with the sticker that says, "Yes, I lied before--throw it out." (And I emphasize that no one and nothing but the appropriate bar-code scanner can read that sticker. It isn't even color-coded.)

And as Fox points out, that is not primarily a Red Cross rule. Absolutely any institution that collects blood, whether it's a regional blood bank that the Red Cross operates, or a true hospital blood bank that serves just one hospital, must ask that same question. That is a universal rule that the Food and Drug Administration, which registers all blood banks and blood dispensaries, imposes on absolutely every blood bank. You can read all their regulations about blood here. (Most hospital laboratories that are called "blood banks" are not true "blood banks" at all, because they don't collect blood; they merely dispense it. Such a service is called a "transfusion service" or a blood dispensary, not a blood bank.)

Full disclosure requires me, right now, to state that I have served as a clinical laboratory associate director. And in my time I have been a co-administrator of, and medical staff liaison for, two hospital blood dispensaries. I have seen those dispensaries through accreditation inspections by both the College of American Pathologists and the American Association of Blood Banks (which covers blood dispensaries as well as true blood banks that handle collection as well as dispensation). And when one hospital where I was on staff explored the notion of collecting autologous blood (that is to say, letting the patient give blood to be set aside in advance of an operation to be performed on himself), I called the FDA to find out what extra certification would be required.

All that to say that I know, better than the Western Oregon University Student Senate, about what sort of regulation human blood comes under, and why. When some HIV-tainted blood made it through the screening process at the Tennessee Regional Red Cross Blood Center, the director of that center got fired. I remember that, because I was a resident in Pathology at Vanderbilt University Affiliated Hospitals at the time--and indeed that scandal broke shortly after I finished my own stint in Vanderbilt University Hospital's blood bank (yes, they collect blood, mainly from autologous or "directed" donors). And among the commentaries that I read in my medical journals nearly every day for a month, were a litany of we-told-you-so's from Jehovah's Witnesses, who are famous for refusing transfusions under all circumstances.

That's when the FDA ordered all blood banks to ask that infamous question. It's a good question, because when you don't ask it, people have their lives foreshortened. It's that simple. Therefore, this comment by WOU Student Senator Shauna Bates, is absolutely irresponsible:

There may be less blood in the blood supply, or we can continue to have a world full of hate and discrimination.

How would she feel if she contracted AIDS from an infected blood unit given by one of those "victims of discrimination" that she seems to care so much about? But that's the trouble with undergraduate student activists--they never think things through. At least, the liberals don't--because liberalism is largely an emotion-based ideology, based solely on what "feels good" at the moment. You can't base public policy on that kind of emotion. That's a good way to get people killed.