On the top of the pre-Delta variant COVID-19 pandemic, Stephen Rawlings, MD, PhD, was doing HIV and SARS-CoV-2 analysis when a pair of males, a pair, got here to him. Each of them had had COVID-19. Each wished to donate convalescent plasma or in any other case contribute to stopping the virus. Rawlings needed to inform them no.
For Rawlings and his principal investigator (PI), it was a weird second.
“Right here the PI was a homosexual man, I used to be a homosexual man, and there have been these two males – and all of us couldn’t donate,” Rawlings stated. “However we have been nonetheless, in our personal method, forging higher science.”
On this case, the would-be volunteers have been in a position to contribute antibodies, not complete blood – that’s, blood that hasn’t but been divided into its element components, equivalent to platelets and plasma. That’s as a result of because the early HIV epidemic, homosexual, bisexual, and different males who’ve intercourse with males (MSM) couldn’t donate complete blood. At first, it was ever, even when they’d had intercourse with one man in 1978 and by no means once more. In 2018, the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration (FDA) allowed homosexual males to present blood in the event that they’d been abstinent for 12 months. After which, in 2020, contemplating the COVID-19 pandemic’s impression on the blood provide, the FDA modified the coverage once more to scale back the abstinence interval to three months.
Many, together with officers on the White Home, have lately argued that the present blood donation coverage is outdated and unscientific. However what may a extra science-based blood donation coverage seem like?
What we name the U.S. blood donation coverage is definitely an amalgam of standards that individuals should meet earlier than they’re allowed to donate. It contains all the pieces from medical and prescription histories to a slew of questions on current conduct. These embrace questions on having had sexually transmitted illnesses, nonprescription injection drug use, and up to date tattoos, amongst others. As well as, males additionally should not have had intercourse with one other man within the final 3 months, and ladies should not have had intercourse with a person who’s had intercourse with one other man within the final 3 months. As soon as an individual will get via all these hurdles, workers at blood facilities like Affect Life, which gives blood to a number of dozen hospitals within the U.S., will examine an individual’s arms for needle tracks.
Discovering none, the customer “lays down and bleeds,” stated Louis Katz, MD, appearing chief medical director for Affect Life. Blood vials then go down the corridor, the place they endure blood typing and testing for all the pieces from cytomegalovirus to West Nile virus to Zika to hepatitis B and C.
After which, in fact, there’s HIV, “the poster-child an infection that we fear about,” stated international blood advisor Jeffrey McCullough, MD, professor emeritus of laboratory medication and pathology on the College of Minnesota Medical Faculty.
Whereas all blood can now be screened, McCullough stated that blood banks want to start out with a clear pattern slightly than take away issues later within the course of.
“We need to begin with the highest-quality product,” he stated. And whereas seven HIV exams can be found now to check the blood provide, together with PCR, antigen, antibody, and nucleic acid exams, exams are by no means 100% correct, stated McCullough. The query of how clear is clear sufficient is the center of the problem: Is a protracted abstinence interval actually required, or is there a greater, extra scientific method to minimize down on threat?
McCullough stated that the present blood provide is the most secure it is ever been – even with the now 3-month deferral in homosexual and bisexual males giving blood. And Katz stated that getting HIV via the blood provide is so uncommon that scientists need to estimate it utilizing fashions.
As HIV testing and therapy have advanced over time, these fashions present that the danger of HIV making it into the blood provide has additionally dropped, stated Brian Custer, PhD, director of epidemiology and coverage science on the Vitalant Analysis Institute. In 1986, fashions recommended that one unit of blood in 22,000 may include HIV. Extra lately, these fashions estimate the danger of HIV making it into the blood provide at 1 in 1.5 million to three million.
However the U.S. blood donation coverage is filled with contradictions, stated Jeff Crowley, former director of the White Home Workplace of Nationwide AIDS Coverage. Crowley, now a professor at Georgetown College Legislation Faculty, describes these because the “hypocrisies” within the present system.
“In heterosexuals, we tolerate a excessive degree of threat and it’s nearly like zero tolerance with homosexual males,” he stated of the unique lifetime deferral coverage. “For those who have been a heterosexual man who had condomless intercourse with a intercourse employee, you may get deferred for six months. However it was a lifetime deferral for homosexual males. It simply doesn’t make any sense in the event you’re attempting to guard individuals.”
So what protects the utmost variety of individuals most effectively, with the least threat and least quantity of discrimination? Right here’s what science says.
In accordance with CDC information, receptive condomless anal intercourse carries the best threat of HIV transmission, adopted by being the insertive accomplice in condomless anal intercourse. Then receptive companions in vaginal intercourse have the subsequent highest threat. The bottom threat is for 2 girls having non-insertive intercourse. And whereas homosexual males are almost certainly to have receptive anal intercourse, they aren’t the one ones who do. A 2020 modeling research within the American Journal of Reproductive Immunology recommended that 41% of recent HIV diagnoses in American girls have been the results of condomless anal intercourse. There’s additionally some information that recommend that, for unknown causes, cisgender girls’s rectal lining could also be extra susceptible to HIV than males’s.
And homosexual males aren’t the one individuals who get HIV. For example, almost 1 in 4 new HIV transmissions within the U.S. occurred in heterosexual adults in 2019. Individuals who inject medicine made up 7% of recent diagnoses, based on the CDC. Proper now, the FDA isn’t learning deferral insurance policies for heterosexuals at larger threat of HIV, although, stated Custer.
Blood facilities do defer individuals from donating blood if they’ve a historical past within the final 3 months of intercourse work or injecting medicine, nonetheless.
A extra science-based method could also be to ask everybody about their sexual conduct. However that’s not what the Assessing Donor Variability And New Ideas in Eligibility (ADVANCE) research is doing. Designed and funded by the FDA, the research is contemplating different choices for decide when homosexual and bisexual males may give blood. The research asks homosexual and bisexual males questions on their sexual conduct, equivalent to what number of companions males have had lately and in the event that they use condoms or HIV prevention medicines, often called pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), stated Custer. The research received’t be testing these questions amongst heterosexuals.
“These are the questions that may at some point be on a future blood donor historical past questionnaire,” stated Custer. “A up to date, science-based method to coverage is precisely what we’re attempting to do.”
Again when the ban on homosexual males donating blood got here out, there have been no exams for HIV. A ban was a blunt instrument. However it has lengthy since been changed by correct HIV exams, stated Katz.
“By the late Nineties, we had nucleic acid exams – PCR, principally – that would detect HIV inside 7 to 10 days,” he stated.
And that ought to imply, Rawlings stated, {that a} homosexual man in a mutually monogamous relationship for the final 10 years the place neither accomplice has HIV ought to have the ability to donate the identical as anybody else. “I’m pretty assured that monogamous homosexual males may be proven to be protected” donating blood, stated Katz.
Rawlings is himself one such man.
“If I’d had a brand new intercourse accomplice and it was unprotected and within the final 7 days, I mustn’t give blood,” he stated. “Present coverage doesn’t account for that.”
There is likely to be one glitch in that advice, stated Custer, of the Vitalant Analysis Institute: HIV transmissions whereas somebody is utilizing HIV prevention meds inconsistently, although uncommon, might end in simply sufficient remedy within the blood to maintain the extent of virus within the blood very low. It’s unclear whether or not present exams would catch that, he stated.
That’s the place the ADVANCE research is available in. Along with asking questions on males’s sexual conduct and testing blood for HIV, researchers may even take a look at blood for concentrations of one of the crucial frequent PrEP medicine, tenofovir. After 2 weeks, members return to search out out the outcomes of the HIV take a look at and fill out one other, longer questionnaire on private conduct. By correlating concentrations of the drug to HIV testing, they hope to determine whether or not that theoretical threat is an actual threat. Custer stated they hope to have research outcomes early subsequent 12 months.
It’s additionally doable, he stated, that individuals who take PrEP are at decrease threat of donating blood containing HIV as a result of the remedy is 99% efficient in stopping HIV. Proper now it’s a paradox.
“I don’t know if will probably be sufficient,” he stated of the information they’ll be gathering. “Via a mixture of testing biomarkers for an infection and PrEP use, in addition to self-reported behaviors, we’re going to come back as shut as we will to having the proof.”
However perhaps it doesn’t should be sufficient. Because the FDA diminished the MSM deferral interval to three months in April 2020, the Transfusion-Transmissible An infection Monitoring System (TTIMS) has been following whether or not there’s been an uptick in donations containing HIV. To date, researchers haven’t analyzed that information, however they count on to have outcomes by the tip of 2022.
It’s additionally unclear whether or not the ADVANCE research will end in modifications to the FDA’s deferral insurance policies for homosexual males. If it does, the U.S. will be part of the U.Ok., France, and Greece, amongst others, to donate based mostly on conduct, not identification. That might make 4.2 million individuals eligible. Primarily based on the share of eligible individuals who truly donate, that could possibly be a further 615,300 pints of blood.
No matter occurs, Katz stated it’s clear the FDA will want new information to make its determination.
In accordance with him, a greater science-based coverage may defer non-monogamous homosexual males from giving blood for 7 to 10 days after their final sexual expertise, in order that HIV exams might decide up a brand new an infection, after which base donations on precise particular person conduct as a substitute of a blanket deferral based mostly on identification.
“There’s no purpose we will’t do higher,” he stated. “Backside line, we should not have sense but for the perfect behavioral approaches, and that’s what the analysis is asking.”
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