yeah and when your workplace does a blooddrive

and your boss who's married gives blood and lies on the questionaire about his gay romps in the bathhouses donates then what..as an IT pro who monitors network usage and email it was pretty well known that he trolls for bareback pump and dump scenarios on craigslist.

and he gives blood frequently and encourages everyone else to do the same out of some christian obligation facade.

I always lie on those questionaires and I've been giving blood for years.

The Blood Bank once refused to take my blood because they said I had hepatitis.

I was certain I didn't and argued, but they were certain I had it: "The tests don't lie" they claimed.

Only when I really got pissed and complained did she say, "You live on 23rd Street, right?" "No, not me". "Oh, sorry, same name; different person." Then they took my blood.

So simple human errors could screw things up.

How about IV drug users?

blood supplies are kept low because blood is SOLD.

its a scam, you donate blood and they sell it.

they only keep a little bit around for emergencies, the rest is considered surplus and SOLD. look it up.

the supplys is always "dangerously" low because that sounds urgent but its an invented crisis.

The blood is "sold" to recoup THE COSTS OF COLLECTING IT.

PS - every pol who wants to should sign up for a direct transfusion right in front of the baths.

how do they determine a donor's orientation? if they go to take your blood and discover a limp wrist they turn you away?

hahahaha

when you donate, there's a long list of questions you have to answer, which include something like "have you ever had sexual contact with another man" for the men and "have you ever had sexual contact with a man who has had sexual contact with other men" for the women. it's really pretty weird, and i had some gay friends who said they lied on that question and donated anyway.

Thanks for posting this, I now plan on making a blood donation in the next few weeks. It's good karma.

My understanding is that all donated blood is tested, so why it matters what a persons sexual preference is escapes me

Here's the problem: yes, blood is tested after donation, but there is an approximately 21-day window between the time you are exposed to HIV and the time your test for antibodies to HIV turns positive. There is a significant segment of sexually-active gay men who have risky sexual encounters.

It is this segment that can potentially harbor HIV and not have a positive test. Their blood donations can be infected, yet not show up on routine testing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV_test#Window_period

donated blood is tested with an antibody test, which is what you describe, but that is followed by a nucleic acid test, which actually tests for HIV and not its antibodies, dramatically reducing chances for a false positive because of a window period.

If HIV were present ONLY in gay men, your comment would make sense.

This never made much sense to me. I do understand the problem with donations from high-risk groups but if that was the case why not ban blacks and poor people from donating too?