This paper to me was quite a challenge.

Through this I realized theres certain things the government will or will not talk about. How much it would cost to put homosexual blood through tests, why they havent considered it before, and so on. All in all, this paper was meant to trigger an issue that has been forgotten for decades. All of us believe we can do something to better our world, or even the community around us. I wanted to make the reader aware that even though this has been happening since the early nineteen eighties, so much has changed. I wanted the reader not to go PRO-GAY MARRIAGE and all the other things that are happening with homosexuals, but to see that they are a group of people that are being harassed because of their sexual orientation. And for them to think to themselves Is it right? Or not right?

I shouldnt have to choose between my sexuality and saving lives

By Marie Caceres

One doesnt think they can have a big impact on this world with almost seven billion people. Youre a grain in a giant stovetop pot of rice. Yet we all once in a while feel compelled to give something to others that is much needed to live: blood. On a normal day, just like this one, I decided to pick up the Niner Times student-edited newspaper in UNC Charlotte. And there I saw it, on the top. Someone had written a brief article starting with this point: Im ,gay. Why cant I give blood too? He wrote about how he found it unfair that a few months into the semester, he was turned down due to his sexual orientation. It came to a point where a group of gay students would go up and ask people to donate blood, just because they couldnt. This law was put into place decades ago, yet so much has been changed the past thirty years. Technology has advanced, many laws, including gay rights, have changed. Now is this ban still being used for the safety and security of the public? Or have the Food and Drug Administration and other organizations put this plan into place as a way of discriminating against the gay community?

The Eighties: Fear, AIDS, and Homophobia

In the late 1970s San Francisco had the highest rates of venereal disease, or VD, in the country (Bellefountaine). The first articles that appeared in the press were in June of 1981. These followed up with others like U.S CDC Studies Pneumonia That Strikes Gay Men and Gay men and KS. As illness and deaths kept spreading, the requests for funding finally began. San Francisco in a year was funding two million dollars for research (Bellefountaine). By 1983, medical associations where manipulating the media as many ways as possible. Then in that same year, an article from the Medical World News was released stating that nitrites arent responsible for AIDS. The gay community was blamed and is still being blamed today. With many changes in the society and the fear of the spread of aids, the ban against them was made. The policy clearly states that any man whos had sex with another man since the year 1977 cannot donate blood because of the high change of HIV/AIDS in the gay community (United). While I was in the process of writing this paper, many people asked, Well how would one know if another person is homosexual or not? Thats simple: In accordance to the FDA policy, male donors are ALWAYS asked in a questionnaire prior to giving blood if they have had male-to-male intercourse. Kara Rose from USA Today wrote this in one of her articles, As science and technology have progressed and we have become far more adept in being able to detect HIV and AIDS in blood, this ban really has just become one of the last messages of written discriminatory policies on LGBT men (Rose). When the ban first began, it was something logical. It was difficult to test for these diseases in the mid and late 80s or to really understand them for that matter.

The Real Deal: So who exactly can give blood? The United States Federal and Drug Administration (FDA) goes all the way back to 1862 when chemist Charles M. Wethrill set up a lab to begin sampling various things in our everyday lives: food, fertilizers and soils. From then on they always worried about the safety of US citizens. The United States Food and Drug Administration has many strict laws against who can and cannot give blood. Not only are gay men being denied, but the FDA has also gone far enough to reject people that have visited the United Kingdom. In August of 1999, people that resided in U.K. were in the risk of exposure of nvCJD or New Variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease through U.K. blood products (United).

People who have hepatitis are also denied because those same carriers can be perfectly healthy and show no case of the strand. They could have negative results due to those viruses not always being detectable. The FDA currently also does not allow and automatically disqualify blood given by those who have lived in European countries, due to reports of having spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease (Owings). Now there was this question that really interested me on the Questions and Answers page of the FDA. Someone asked Recently, I was informed by my local blood bank that I would no longer be able to donate blood because of an indeterminate test result for HIV. In light of the fact that there is a reported blood shortage, how can I be deferred if it has been determined that I do not have HIV? The FDA answered back responding, Once an indeterminate or inconclusive result is obtained, the donor should indefinitely be deferred (United). No matter who you are: Hispanic, Black, White, Asian, Tall, Short, once you have been tested as inconclusive, you CANNOT donate blood. This would be leaving person, male or female that is in healthy state, who have never had hepatitis, are not gay men, have not lived out of the country in Europe, and are seventeen years of age or older and weigh over 110 pounds. But what I am curious about is what happens to the gay men that have proven to not have the virus? Now what does sexual orientations have to do with it? .In the end of May of 2007, the FDA announced that they would retain the ban. Since then, it has been judged by advocacy groups, physicians, and even politicians. The ACTUAL chance of getting HIV from a blood transfusion is about one per every two million units of blood transfused, so says the FDAs website (Owings). The policy reflects public health choices from the mid 80s. In reality, it is true through statistics given by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that men who have male-to-male intercourse account for the largest number of newly infected people with the viruses. However still, a homosexual man whos had a monogamous relationship and is completely healthy and HIV-negative, does not have a say. Straight People Can Have HIV too. If a man has sex with a high-risk woman, hes allowed back into the donation pool after twelve months, said Joel Ginsberg, the executive director of Gay and Lesbian Medical Association. If he has safe sex with another man, hes banned for life (Owings). People all over the country, students, advocates, organizations, and politicians see a need to change this. The American mentality the past decades has changed to where we today, dont judge race, gender, or sexual orientation.

My Studies: Going into the mind of UNCC students I am a freshman Mechanical Engineering major. I really wanted to know what my peers around me knew about the ban, and put in a few of their thoughts into this paper. And if they didnt know, the word could have been spread! People our age become eager to tell people things theyve learned. With this Inquiry journey, I plan to show it to many. So I decided to do a hunt of others ideas! On the popular social network site, Facebook, I created a survey for my fellow peers to answer through the UNCC Freshman 2011 group page. I gave them a quick statement of what I was researching and shortly asked them following questions:

1) There is a policy stating that gay men are NOT allowed to donate blood. Have you heard about this before I mentioned it on this page? a. Only sixty-three percent of students asked knew about the ban or have heard of it slightly. The remaining thirty-seven percent had never heard it! 2) If yes, where have you heard it from (newspaper, TV, radio, Facebook/Twitter, people, etc.) a. From those who have heard of the gay man, almost HALF of the survey takers heard it from other people! Its amazing how much can be spread by just hearing it from someone else. Nineteen percent have heard it while they were in the process of donating blood, 26 percent from books and television, and 7 percent from the actual news. 3) Do you consider it to be wrong? Should this law stay in place? Or is it something you just dont really care about? a. Only ONE person thought it to be wrong out of all of the survey takers. Many of them made remarks like If we can, they should too! and Thats just completely judgmental! 4) Do you have a homosexual friend? a. Living in the world today, many of us have friends or acquaintances, homosexual or not. A strong eighty three percent of the survey takers also do too. 5) Have you yourself donated or have thought about donating blood? a. Eighty-eight percent of the survey takers said they would donate blood. All in all, from my own research, most of these people heard it from others, and think the ban to be wrong.

What Conans got to say About It! I listened to Neil Conan, a radio talk show host, interview Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania actually studying the science behind the law on National Public Radio, or as many of us know it, NPR. They said the ban made on gays was suboptimal, but was still kept in affect. Now what exactly does suboptimal mean? The normal definition found on dictionary.com would be this: being below level or standard. Did the ban make sense at one time? Back in the early 80s, there wasnt enough proper testing on how to find it. Now, the American Association of Blood Banks require ALL these test to be performed: The ABO test (to determine the donors blood type), tests for Hepatitis, and the HIV-1 and 2 antibodies. When youre mixing on infected donor and bringing them into the blood pool, you are infecting thousands of people and this could be crucial to hemophiliacs. Yet did they ever think about other groups that could perhaps be infected? Heterosexuals that have unprotected sex, those who share IVs and syringes, and those who visit prostitutes. Whats changed since then? Better testing, mapping of the genomes in the viruses. A scientist has discovered how to create copies of the genes of bacteria! It works very well but like most of us know, it wasnt there in 1983. What happened before would not happen now. Now they say that if you ever had male-to-male intercourse since 1977, youre out of the blood pool. It doesnt make any sense and is seen as only the discrimination of one group. Blood supply in the United States is low: 1 in 250 and even a smaller number donate more than once. Older Americans, WW2 veterans and people in that era, donated more than and by excluding gay men, youre taking out people that could be put in the pool. I shouldnt have to choose between my sexuality and saving lives. The terrible problems in the 80s had a bad scar and experience with dying hemophiliacs, but as sciences moved it isnt right to pick on one group. How long has this policy been in effect, even though its not needed? France has been rid of it, and have had no problem in the safety of the blood. Senator Jon Kerry and others are trying to help overturn the law, yet it still hasnt happened. If youre interested in hearing more of this radio episode, click HERE. The Ban in Our Own Space This ban on Gay men has the wrong effect on students in colleges all around the country. People in fact have tried at first boycotting the blood drives, but more of the time they want to educate people who dont know about this. Even

out of the country like in the University of Toronto in Canada, have been making posters and setting up campaigns for this. The reporter Kara Rose said I argued its not a very good idea to boycott because people need blood. Rather, get students to show they are upset about this policy and pass out fliers and help educate the public of what the issue is. See what you can do for our community. EIGHTEEN percent of the blood donated through blood banks come from high schools and colleges (Rose). With what I have learned throughout this inquiry, and learning what many people including students know and didnt know, I could write this to inform my fellow peers, just the same way that writer from Niner Times did. If we, as college students, think we dont have a say in the world we live in today, we DO.

Works Cited Bellefountaine, Michael. AIDS in the Early Eighties Magnus Magazine 2001: Web. FDA Ban On Blood Donated By Gay Men Upheld. NPR. 29 Jan. 2010. Radio Owings, Laura. Is the FDAs Ban on Gay Men Donating Blood Discriminatory? ABC NEWS. 30 Jan. 2012 Rose, Kara. FDA policy prohibits gay men from donating blood. USA Today College. Web. 30 Jan. 2012 United States Food and Drug Administration. Donating Blood Questions and Answers. 2009. Web. 3 Feb. 2012. University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Gay Ban on Donating Blood. Survey. 17 March 2012