Where only mosquitoes win

Where only mosquitoes win

I should be a walking blood bank. I’m one of only nine percent of Australians who are type O Rh Negative -” the most sought after of bloods because it’s the only type that can be given to anyone, yet I can only take O back.

I’ve never used an intravenous drug, never had an STD, never had unprotected sex, and most years I’m lucky to count the number of partners I’ve had on one hand. To top this off I recently had a blood test, which unsurprisingly came back negative across all categories.

If someone’s life was in danger and no other blood was available, a doctor could make the transfusion direct from my arm. But although I haven’t had sex since my test, the Australian Red Cross does not want my blood or yours -” simply because we aren’t heterosexual.

If I were straight, the Red Cross would accept my blood, even if I had unprotected sex with multiple partners every day of the week, so long as I didn’t think any of them might be a drug user, a recent migrant, a haemophiliac, or have a blood-borne disease.

To the Red Cross it doesn’t matter that the vast majority of gay men are both disease-free and responsible, that we use condoms far more frequently than straights, or that each donation is already tested before it goes into the supply.

Even though blood banks are crying out for blood, ours isn’t good enough for the Red Cross -” despite the organisation already accepting transplant organs from gay men, through which that same blood flows.

But the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal is now hearing a case that may change this policy thanks to the hard work of Launceston gay man Michael Cain and the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, who’ve been pursuing this issue for three years at state and federal levels.

Despite overseas precedents demonstrating higher levels of safety from screening individual behaviour rather than blanket bans, the Red Cross is fighting tooth and nail on this one -” and its conduct in this matter has been nothing short of bizarre, with representatives of the Red Cross repeatedly claiming homosexuality is a chosen lifestyle, that there is no such thing as safe gay sex and generally cherry-picking studies to paint gay and bisexual men in the worst possible light.

Thankfully an army of expert witnesses has been assembled to refute these claims -” and the case for change looks good.

It could be a year before a verdict. In the meantime my blood, and that of thousands of other Australian gay and bisexual men, will continue to go to waste.

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4 responses to “Where only mosquitoes win”

  1. Chris, I have to say that when researching this column I was surprised to find that so many of the men and women on the Red Cross’ executive have non-medical backgrounds.

  2. The simple fact is that the Red Cross in Australia is run by a pack of fusty old religious conservatives who rate prejudice ahead of science. Oh, and crochet – they love crochet, especially those little blackets made of crochet squares.

    The real shame is that in the 21st century, we allow a totally unaccountable NGO to control the nation’s blood supply. And clearly they aren’t up to it.

  3. Hi Erica, the fact is that they already test every donor when they test their blood before it goes into supply.

    There are also other groups in society who have higher rates of HIV and STDs than the general population, such as Indigenous Australians and migrants from African countries, yet there are no blanket bans on these groups- just the gays.

    If you read the testimony from the experts who’ve spoken on behalf of the Red Cross, you’d see that many are people who have a very stereotyped idea of how most gay men live their lives.

    Changing the questions on the screening questionnaire would still exclude gay men who indulge in risky behaviour, while also excluding heterosexuals who indulge in risky behaviour as well. Currently these risky heterosexuals are allowed to donate and when a positive result comes in when their donated blood is tested they have to throw it away, wasting time and money in the process.

    The blanket ban on blood donation from gay men reinforces the idea that we are diseased (the vast majority of us are not) and a threat to the wider community.

    Further more Spain and Italy have already changed their policy to the one being suggested and as a result have cut the rate of bad blood getting through to the testing stage to one sixth and one third respectively to when there was a blanket ban on gay donors, and in the process, increased their pool of available donors.

    Meanwhile, 13 percent of the Australian blood supply is over two weeks old, when blood of this age has the potential to kill around one in one hundred of the patients it is given to.

  4. I can see the argument that the real issue is promiscuity and the practicing of safe sex, but the stats do demonstrate that gay/bisexual men are more likely to have HIV than straight men. Short of testing every donor, I thnk that this is a reasonable approach. Surely there are much bigger issues surrounding homophobia than this – there is clearly no intent to be homophobic, merely a desire to keep blood safe through a practical approach.
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