Associated Students' Senate to Consider Campus Blood Drives

Hello my fellow students.

Last week the Associated Students' Senate hosted a discussion regarding a resolution Dr. Luttmann proposed to the Academic Senate which "strongly urges the campus Administration to rescind immediately the authorization of Blood Banks to operate on this campus, due to their discriminatory policy against gay men". Present in the discussion were Dr. Rick Luttmann, Dr. Georgia Schwartz (Director of SSU's Student Health Center), Cathy Bryan (President and CEO of the Blood Bank of the Redwoods), and Dianna Nation (Chair of JUMP, the student organization that hosts the blood drives).

Dr. Luttmann posits that the era when it made sense to disallow men who have had sex with men to donate blood due an increased risk of transmitting HIV into the blood supply has passed. He claims that in the last 30 years, screening has become more accurate and that it is unnecessary to bar gay men from donating blood.

Dr. Georgia Schwartz helped to clarify the FDA's policy explaining some of the logic behind multiple measures to reduce the risk of transmitting disease into the blood supply. Screening is a very effective measure to ensure the safety of the supply, but no test is 100% reliable. Nor is any blood collection site, nor any blood storage facility, nor any lab technician. There is always room for error. The policy to deffer patients at higher risk of infection of certain diseases, then, provides protection at the front end of the blood supply. By having safety measures on both ends, the supply is safer.

This is, however, an extremely complicated issue. Statistics show that gay men are still at a much higher risk for infection, but that other groups such as certain racial minorities as well as heterosexual women have new infection rates higher than that of gay men. Should they, too, be prohibited from donating blood?

The discussion at the senate table was not intended to answer or bring resolution to the many questions these issues raise. We will, however, consider a resolution sponsored by one of the student senators at our meeting March 5th. This resolution opposes the interruption of blood donation services at Sonoma State.

Berkeley has a very interesting program to address the issue. This February, Berkeley held its first ever "Sponsor Blood Drive" where those who could not donate for one of the 50 reasons you can be turned away from donating blood were encouraged to go out and find someone to donate blood in their name. The idea is to raise awareness about the policy.

So I ask you, my fellow students, what do you think? Is the FDA policy barring gay men from donating blood unnecessarily restrictive? Is it discriminatory? Is it homophobic? Should Sonoma State continue to host blood drives despite the policy? Leave your comments here or send me an email. We welcome all input as we evaluate the issue of blood drives and the FDA policy.

Jonathan T. White
Associated Students
Speaker of the Senate
speakera@sonoma.edu