The deferral period should be no longer than 30 days.” When a slightly less restrictive policy was issued, Dan Bruner, the senior director of policy at Washington, DC’s longstanding HIV clinic, Whitman-Walker Health, released a similar statement: “The updated policy is still discriminatory and not rooted in the reality of HIV testing today.
Is the blood from a gay man really that much more tainted and possibly dangerous than others? It’s an assumption that has been in place for over 30 years - but it also exposes a troubling fear of gay men that may have been in place even longer. How the ban began. In 1983, as the AIDS epidemic began to grip the nation, the Food and Drug Administration enacted a total ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men in an attempt to keep the HIV virus out of the blood supply.
