
Health Equity
In Their Own Words
All I Want for the New Year is a Chance to Give Blood: How Outdated Rules Restrict Gay Men from Donating
A Call for Policy Change
The following excerpt is from an op-ed that first appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on December 27, 2022.
In the wake of landmark bipartisan approval of legislation to legalize same-sex marriage across the country, it is time to repair the policy that uniquely discriminates against a large group of men who want to give blood.
Some may be as surprised as I was to learn that the current rule discriminates against men who have sex with men. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently reviewing its policy, which began during the early days of the HIV epidemic, well before treatment for HIV was commonplace, and long before testing for the virus was as accurate as it is today. The agency is expected to update its guidance soon, with leading organizations such as the American Red Cross in support of needed changes.
As a physician, and a gay married man who has been monogamous for close to 17 years, I first confronted this antiquated legislation when my husband and I decided to do what we could at the beginning of the pandemic. At that time, there was a severe blood shortage, and we scheduled appointments to donate blood.
Only then did we discover that we needed to attest to being celibate for three months before being allowed to donate blood. We were shocked. I mean, our children may call us “old-school,” but they would never mistake us for monks. This policy had been in place since 2020, before which the FDA-sanctioned “deferral” time for men who had sex with men was 12 months of celibacy.
There was a time when this approach was justified. But not now.
Read the entire op-ed, here.
Author

Kevin B. Johnson, MD, MS
Professor, Biostatistics, Epidemiology, Informatics and Pediatrics, Perelman School of Medicine; Professor, Computer and Information Science, and Bioengineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science; Professor, Science Communication, Annenberg School for Communication
More on Health Equity


How Race Distorts One Area of Health Care: The Problem of Race-Specific Tests in Lung Care
Using Different Baseline Lung Function for Black and White Patients Leads to Lower Rates of Diagnosis in Black Patients

Chart of the Day: An Online Education Platform Reduced Pregnancy-Related Anxiety
Study Finds Lower Worry Around Body Image, Delivery, and More for Low-Income, High-Risk Patients

Community Health Workers’ Role Grows With Evidence That They Improve Care and Equity
Benefits Include More Access to Care and Lower Costs, but Funding is Limited

Ending UNOS’s Monopoly Over the U.S. Organ Transplant System
First-Ever Change Aims to Improve Efficiency, Survival, and Equity — But LDI Experts Advise Caution

What Patient-To-Nurse Ratios Mean for Hospital Patient Health and Outcomes
Pennsylvania Legislature Pushed to Take Up Patient Safety Issue It Has Long Avoided

Study Finds Home Health Is Another Care Setting Where Workers Use Harsher Language for Black and Hispanic Patients
Patients Described Negatively, Had Much Shorter Visits According to the First Study of Its Kind on Home Health

Extreme Heat and Health: Understanding the Scope of the Problem
From the 2023 Perry World House Global Shifts Colloquium, “Living With Extreme Heat: Our Shared Future.”