The Food and Drug Administration plans to lift its lifetime ban on blood donation for men who have had sex with other men, and will propose replacing it with a one-year ban after homosexual activity, the agency announced Tuesday.
Gay rights groups, which have long advocated a change to the ban, largely decried the announcement, saying that expecting gay blood donors to remain celibate for a year is not reasonable or medically necessary.
Others were heartened by the relaxation of a long-criticized ban. This is a very good next step in a process that began in the early 1980s, said Jay Menitove, who chaired a federal advisory committee that recommended the change.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Healths National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, Theres no doubt about it, that any way that you can safely add to the pool of donors to counter this chronic shortage of blood is a good thing.
The recommended change could increase the U.S. blood supply by 2 percent, researchers said.
Since 1983, the FDA has banned any man from donating blood if he has had sex with another man, even one time, since 1977. The policy was instituted in the early days of the AIDS crisis, when little was known about HIV and fears were rising of a virus transmitted among gay and bisexual men.
As tests for HIV in donated blood became standard, calls for the FDA to lift the ban increased. Last year, the American Medical Association called for a change; one board member called the ban discriminatory.
Peter Marks, deputy director of the FDAs Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a telephone call with reporters Tuesday that the FDA would draft the new guidelines early next year and then revise them after a public comment period. He said he could not confirm whether the new rules would go into effect next year.
Marks also said the FDAs study of the issue led it to conclude that gay men should be allowed to donate blood only if they have been abstinent for one year.
At this time, the scientific evidence is not compelling that we can change to anything less than a one-year deferral and still maintain the current level of safety of the blood supply, he said.
Gay rights groups challenged that statement Tuesday. They said tests can reliably detect HIV in the blood within much less than a year of infection, so imposing a longer ban is unnecessary.
