4 ms·
My girlfriend accidentally told the donation center she went to Mexico, and they banned her from donating for four years. Apparently you'd only go to Mexico to
by hombre_fatal 4mo ago
My girlfriend accidentally told the donation center she went to Mexico, and they banned her from donating for four years.
Apparently you'd only go to Mexico to eat brain tacos and share needles with cows. Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood.
- notrealyme123 4mo agoI was banned roughly the same time for being in the US. I guess its mostly so they don't need to check for unexpected things.
- hombre_fatal 4mo agoI get it, just seems like it could be more granular, especially since she could have just said no.
- seethishat 4mo agoYes... travel, tattoos, drug use and sexual behavior can and should disqualify a person from donating blood.
- hombre_fatal 4mo agoWell, it's the having of an infectious blood borne thing that disqualifies you.
- smcg 4mo agom-m sex is still disqualifying even if all parties are completely clean and safe. it's discriminatory.
- sarchertech 4mo agoAll anal sex in the US requires a 3 month waiting period (as does any kind of sex with a new partner) not just male to male. Anal sex is inherently much more likely to transit HIV and HIV tests have a higher false negative rate for new infections.
- Duwensatzaj 4mo ago0.4% of the US population has HIV. 12-15% of gay men in the US have HIV. The rules exist for a very real reason.
- 486sx33 4mo ago[dead]
- tristor 4mo agoMSM is one of the highest risk activities you can do for bloodborne diseases. If this is discriminatory, life is discriminatory. Life is not fair, and there is nothing any artificially constructed social system will ever do to force mother nature's hands to make life fair. I fully support the rights of people to love and be in relationships with whoever they wish, but that doesn't mean you have the right to contaminate the blood supply due to the inherently high risk of your day-to-day life. I have never been able to donate blood because of my travels due to their locations and frequencies. I am not going to give up travel to donate blood. MSM is a much higher risk activity than travel, and yet I am also excluded due to my lifestyle risk. It's not fair, but it is reasonable.
- maerF0x0 4mo agoPeople have more unprotected, regrettable sex during travel and vacations, so maybe they're on to something?
- ClumsyPilot 4mo agoSounds like something you should test rather that just rely on heuristics
- lotsofpulp 4mo agoSounds like something you should evaluate with a cost/benefit analysis, including the false negative and false positive rates.
- tristor 4mo agoHeuristics work, why would you not rely on heuristics?
- jolmg 4mo agoGenerally, because they're discriminatory. It's like how racial profiling in law enforcement can be a heuristic that can work. Though, in the case of blood donations, it seems that tests aren't accurate enough to be able to rely solely on them. Also, being discriminated against on being able to donate blood is not as big of a deal. Though in some places with public health systems, stuff like getting a surgery may somewhat depend on you and family/friends donating a certain amount of blood.
- Ferret7446 3mo agoReality is discriminatory. Discriminating between blood containing disease vs blood that doesn't is, quite literally, discriminatory.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- vablings 4mo agoAll of these things can mostly be tested. When I donated regularly in the UK after being in the southern US, they screen me for west nile virus but still take my blood and use it.
- buckle8017 4mo agoBlood is tested for disease, but the false negative rate for each test is its own risk. If you got blood from an addict living on the street engaging in prostitution and tested it, would you trust that blood? I wouldn't.
- ctoa 4mo agoThe bigger worry isn't really false negatives, modern PCR based testing is incredibly good. There is always risk but it's frankly extremely low. The bigger issue is that blood is pooled before testing to make that powerful testing economical. If you increase the rate at which you get (also possibly false) positives you risk having to throw out whole batches of pooled donations.
- buckle8017 4mo agoThe false negative rate for HIV testing in newly infected people is actually pretty high, like 50% within the first few months high.
- ctoa 3mo agoNo, it's not though. That's true for antibody tests commonly used for individuals because it's cheap. The window period for nucleic acid testing that is used for blood supply is very short. This test is similar to what's used to confirm a positive antibody test, but isn't used for individual testing because it is too expensive. Hence the pooling.
- sarchertech 4mo agoThe UK also has a wait time for many countries including Mexico. https://my.blood.co.uk/eligibility/travel/article?id=47&title=Mexico https://my.blood.co.uk/eligibility/travel/article?id=47&titl... Granted it’s shorter, but there are longer wait periods depending on the country. It’s defense in depth because false negatives happen and some viruses take time to show up on tests.
- throwaway27448 4mo agoI don't get the sense we have any standards for actually vetting the blood that's donated, which is deeply concerning
- ch4s3 4mo agoWe do test the blood, but they also do coarse grained screenings like this to avoid some level of waste on intake.
- account42 4mo agoWe do, they are just not cheap enough to do on individual donations so you have to throw away a big batch every time they catch something.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- ch4s3 4mo agoWe do test the blood, but they also do coarse grained screenings like this to avoid some level of waste on intake. It's like having client and server side validation.
- tsimionescu 4mo agoWith travel, I understand that there is a higher risk of lots of diseases, and testing against all possible infectious diseases is not feasible. Drug use is also obviously disqualifying. But why would you care about someone's sexual behavior? The blood must be tested for common drugs and common blood borne diseases regardless, and it's perfectly possible to engage in sexually risky behaviors and not have any venereal disease (unlike with drug use, where it implicitly means you will have levels of those drugs in your blood), just like it's possible to be very careful with your sexual behavior and still get a disease. Note: for tattoos, I have no idea if the problem is also related to venereal diseases, or if there is any problem from contamination with the tattoo ink itself, and I don't care enough about this subject to look it up.
- zdragnar 4mo agoFor tattoos, if the artist isn't using a brand new set of needles for you, you risk bloodborne disease transmission, with hepatitis B being a particular danger.
- sarchertech 4mo ago> But why would you care about someone's sexual behavior? The blood must be tested for common drugs and common blood borne diseases regardless, and it's perfectly possible to engage in sexually risky behaviors and not have any venereal disease Men who have sex with men are something like 50-100x more likely than the general population to acquire HIV. HIV tests do not have a 0% false positive. They will not catch all very recent infections. The rationale for excluding them until recently is that it’s defense in depth and it doesn’t hurt the blood supply much because they only make up about 2-3% of the population. The current rule is that MSM don’t face a blanket ban, but if you’ve had anal sex in the last 3 months you have to wait because anal sex is inherently more likely to transmit HIV and the tests may not catch a very new infection. Other diseases like Hepatitis have a similar issue.
- otherme123 4mo agoThe answer to all of that is mainly hepatitis C, that can have a window detection of 6 months, even more. And yes, you can be very careful and get a disease. But they are playing statistics here: over 60% of injected drug users have Hep-C, that means a lot of prostitutes. They won't and shouldn't trust anyone who say "hey, I had unsafe sex against all advice, but was very careful with the tattoo in a dark cellar and the heroin party, pinky promise".
- josefritzishere 4mo agoSounds like a wild party.
- Georgelemental 4mo ago> eat brain tacos What's wrong with that? Animal brains are a common dish in many countries, including France, Asia, and parts of the United States
- tim-tday 4mo agoVector for prion disease.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bitshiftfaced 4mo ago"Accidentally"? Implying she should've lied about it even though they probably have some reason (evaluating risk presumably) for asking?
- hombre_fatal 4mo agoLet's say a year ago, you walked across a bridge in Mexico for five minutes to see if it's true that Mexico has a yellowish haze like in the movies. Oh, it doesn't. Then you walked back to Texas. A year later, you go to a blood donation center and they ask you: "Did you go to Mexico in the last N years?" If you say "Yes", you are banned for four years. If you say "No", you donate liters of blood over the next four years. If you were in this exact situation, how would you weight which answer is better?
- bitshiftfaced 4mo agoI understand where you're coming from. But on the off chance something unrelated were to go wrong with the blood down the line, it could be shown that a false answer was knowingly given. You have to weigh this risk against keeping "the privilege to give blood". I guess it depends on your values and risk tolerance.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- rayiner 4mo ago> Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood It's simple Bayesian probability. Blood tests have a relatively high error rate. Hep-B tests have a 6-12% false negative rate early in the disease, and Hep-C is 3-6% even later in the course of the disease. That's considered a "very low" false-negative rate for a blood test. In Bayesian terms, blood tests don’t “screen” for a disease. They reduce the odds ratio of contaminated blood by a factor of 10 or so. But the ultimate odds still depends heavily on the prior odds—the prevalence of the disease in the donor population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability. Even with testing, you can reduce the risk of contaminated blood by drawing blood from a pool of donors that has lower prevalence rate of diseases.
- comrade1234 4mo agoThere are other ways she can donate her blood.