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Making Blood Donation Fairer
It's not hard to see how the blood people broadly discriminate against Africans and gay men, and discriminate for straight people from Britain. One question is whether the system could be made fairer while keeping the risks to the blood supply low.
Note that the blood people have a tradeoff to make. They need to keep the supply of blood simultaneously high and safe. They have little incentive to implement these changes because (in their eyes) they get enough safe blood with the current rules. If that was to change they might have to be more careful about screening continents of people so cavalierly. The reason they opposed the mad cow bans so strongly is that it affected their supply of donors so much. So one way to agitate for change would be a boycott. Maybe that is the right approach. If the blood people faced a widespread boycott, they would have to change their rules quickly or deal with the families of patients who died because there was no blood for them.
Another idea might be to get all the straight men who are eligible to donate to give each other blowjobs. This would also reduce the supply of donors while keeping the blood supply as safe as it was before. Given enough "blow-ins", pressure would mount to change the rules. (Sorry, practicing gay men: you would not be permitted to participate. The idea is to keep the risk -- as defined by the blood people -- equivalent.)
Presenting the blood people with large numbers of safe potential donors who are barred by their rules might pressure the blood people to change the rules. If the rule concerning Africa changes, this will likely be the reasoning. I doubt there are enough safe gay men for this to make a big difference, but I could be wrong. Maybe petitions are in order?
Maybe we could replace one unfair policy by another. Assuming there is causality between number of sex partners and disease infection rates, we could prohibit those who have had more than 6 sex partners (or whatever) from donating. Lots of straight people and some gay people would complain, but so what? If that rule was too strong because it measured lifetime sex partners, we could look at the number of sex partners in the last seven years.
Neither one of these rules addresses partner infidelity, which is a big problem. Technically infidelity is covered by the "have you ever had sex with someone whose sexual background you didn't know" rule, but then again so is casual sex.
If we are frightened that stupid gay men would use blood donation services to get AIDS tests, maybe the blood people could run anonymous testing centres in conjunction with their blood donation clinics. That does not address all of the social stigma associated with disease testing, but maybe it addresses some.
What ideas do you have?
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