CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Tackling inequity in health care
Emily E. Volk, MD
July 2022—The CAP has been looking to identify areas where pathologists can help overcome institutional bias in medicine. As you may have seen, the CAP recently issued a statement supporting a new position from the American Medical Association that calls for a change to the FDA’s policy about blood donations from men who have sex with men. The current rule, established in early 2020 in response to a drastic blood shortage associated with pandemic lockdowns, prohibits blood donations from gay or bisexual men who have engaged in sexual activity in the prior three months. Previously, only gay or bisexual men who abstained from sex for a full year were eligible to donate blood.
Many of you remember as I do the societal rejection of HIV-positive patients that occurred in the late ’80s. I was in medical school at this time, working at the county hospital in Kansas City, Mo. A lack of access to health care elsewhere was only one form of rejection to which our HIV-positive patients were subjected. Added to the list were access to good housing, access to nutritious food, and access to social support.
As a pathology resident interested in blood banking, I accepted the ban on blood donations from gay men as part of the fabric of the time. But even then we certainly acknowledged that there was some degree of hypocrisy to it, since no such permanent ban applied to heterosexual high-risk behavior.
All these decades later, we have testing technology that can ensure the safety and quality of a blood donation regardless of who provided it. There is no more implicit danger for a gay man to donate blood than for anyone else. These discriminatory restrictions on blood donations from gay or bisexual men are holdovers from the original AIDS epidemic, wholly unrelated to the science of blood banking.
Dr. Volk