Sexually active gay men no longer allowed to donate organs

[sourdick]

The CBC reported yesterday on new regulartions from Health Canada about high risk organ donors.
A number of organ donation groups said Monday that they are unaware of new Health Canada regulations that mean sexually active gay men, injection drug users and other groups considered high risk will no longer be accepted as organ donors

Comments

[parsimonia]

Why don't they just ask about unprotected anal sex/sex of any kind? I mean, it could just as easily be a man and woman having unprotected sex and be just as likely to contract an STD.

This is the part that really doesn't make any sense:
"Transplant programs have been screening potential donors, but in some cases use organs from people in high-risk groups if they've tested negative for diseases. The new legislation means that practice must stop."

So, even if they're disease-free, their organs/blood still aren't wanted because they're gay? That is messed up.

[sourdick]

Again, it has less to do with sexuality and more to do with probability. The likelyhood of a homosexual having practiced dangerous activities is far more likely than a normal boring old straight person.

[parsimonia]

But even if the person has been tested and disease-free, this legislation prevents them from being used. That has nothing to do with probability.

[sourdick]

That's not as LIKELY however for a straight person. Its just math.

[sun_tzu]

Problem is that the great concern here is HIV - which cannot be detected in many cases for up to six months - because it can only be tested for by testing for antibodies thereto, which take time to build up to a detectable level.

[ringzero]

And the tests take about 14 days. Organs don't live that long outside of the body.

[ringzero]

You can test a donor organ for HIV, but by the time the test comes back the tissue will be dead and useless.

[mijopo]

The likelyhood of a homosexual having practiced dangerous activities is far more likely than a normal boring old straight person.

Yes, so goes the stereotype. But which data are they using to support their policy?

[sourdick]

Would you accept data from the Center for Disease Control?

( http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/msm/resources/factsheets/msm.htm )

Men who have sex with men accounted for 71% of all HIV infections among male adults and adolescents in 2005

That seems like some pretty decent math right there. Additionally:

The number of HIV diagnoses for men who have sex with men decreased during the 1980s and 1990s, but recent surveillance data show an increase in HIV diagnoses for this group

[mijopo]

Yes, we have data showing that gay men are more likely to have HIV infection, which doesn't show that they practice more dangerous activities, (although I'm not sure what counts as dangerous activity).

That aside, still not sure why testing individuals for the disease isn't adequate. It would be useful to see numbers on how much the safety of the organ pool will be increased by this practice. I suspect not much, because I suspect that the likelihood that an infected organ will slip through because of a false negative is quite low and the likelihood a person is infected given that he's gay is also fairly low, so the increase in safety is extremely low. To justify this practice we need to show (a) that a gay person is likely (not just more likely) to be infected and (b) that an infected person is likely to go undetected. Otherwise, it's hard to justify this kind of discrimination even from a utilitarian/practical consequences perspective.

[hendrikboom]

The criterion mentioned isn't whether they are disease-free, it's whether they have been tested negative for diseases. Those calculating the odds must take into account the number of false negatives.