News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
It absolutely was singled out. You have to specifically say you haven't had gay sex when you donate blood. I've done it plenty of times.
"Singled out" implies that that it stood alone as the only behavior that was screened for. But that's not the case. There always have been and still are numerous other behaviors and activities screened for and denied.
No, 'singled out' means they made a special exception for it that they made for nothing else. They didn't even ask if you had HIV, just if you had gay sex, as if you can't get HIV from heterosexual sex. It was never about HIV, it was about marginalizing gay people once again. And you're excusing it. Shameful.
It's a bit more complicated than that. In the early years of the HIV epidemic they at first didn't even want to screen donors. The blood banks and the FDA were slow to introduce screening for a few reasons, one being that gay men were such good donors that a large proportion of the blood supply would have been removed. Eventually the risk became too great and do screening was introduced, just like we exclude those who were in Britain when TSEs were a risk. Note that these restrictions also never applied to lesbians, because they are not a high risk group.
40 years ago contracting HIV was still a serious, life threatening event. It's also true that in the USA homosexual men represented one of the largest risk groups, unlike in Africa where other factors made spread between heterosexuals more common. It took hold in the gay male community due to the higher risk of anal sex, the popularity of bath houses, and the amount of sex men were having basically. Testing for HIV was also expensive. You could do it at the batch stage to reduce testing, but then you throw away a lot of blood. It's only recently that PreP is widely available and used, so that HIV is more manageable (though it is still a serious illness).
My source for most of this is And The Band Played On, which apart from being one of the saddest books I ever read, outlines well the inaction by politicians, medical funding bodies, and even within the gay community itself, in tackling the epidemic. That it was allowed to happen is a black mark on the Reagan presidency.
They made special exceptions for people who live or travel to specific regions, they made special exceptions for people who have received certain medical procedures, they made special exceptions for needle-based drug users, they made special exceptions for people who've gotten tattoos or piercings, they made special exceptions for other sexual behaviors like paying for sex. You do know what the definition of the word "singled" means, yeah? It means "single" - as in "one". They didn't single out just that one behavior.
Yet again- they only asked if you had gay sex. They didn't ask if you had sex. HIV can be transmitted through any kind of sex. Are you really not aware of that? Because if you are aware of that, why just ask about gay sex?
I'm not going to mansplain the statistics to you when you can just as easily go look them up yourself. Or choose not to. I don't care.
So you don't know that HIV can be transferred through heterosexual sex? Really?
do
you
even
epidemiology