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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30873 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out

Wait, what? This is insane revisionism, the bloody scandal was in the other direction!

https://www.dw.com/en/infected-blood-scandal-a-horrifying-global-disaster/a-70093762

Hundreds of thousands of people got HIV and/or hepatitis via infected blood transfusions over the past decades, and people are still dying.

"Any country that bought contaminated blood from the US in the 1980s was affected," said Wherry.

In Canada, 2,000 people contracted HIV and 60,000 people developed hepatitis C. … in France, more than 4,000 people contracted HIV.

In Germany, a scandal erupted in 1993 after government officials tried to cover up reports of HIV/AIDS in people given infected blood. Over 400 people died, and a third of the country's hemophiliacs (2,000 people at the time) were infected with HIV.

China also saw HIV infections from contaminated blood bought and sold internally. An estimated 300,000 people were infected with HIV through blood selling-schemes in the 1990s.

People are still being infected with diseases by contaminated blood products. In 2016, more than 2,000 people in India contracted HIV from contaminated blood transfusions

Yes you can screen blood, but this was only developed in the mid 80s and had high failure rate, for example it detected antigens which are made by the body after months of infection, so a freshly infected could still contaminate the blood supply.

Yeah, but gay rights activists are angry that MSM can’t donate blood, because they feel it stigmatizes being gay.

But I agree with you, people valuing defeating stigma more than protecting people from serious diseases is a really bad thing. I think the gay community has long been in denial about how seriously HIV/AIDS created rather than reflected stigma against gay men, and my understanding is it became something of a rite of passage back in the day — “I’m pozzed, so I no longer need to worry about it.”

The US recently changed those policies, and monogamous MSM are allowed to donate blood. If it helps, they shortly afterward also allowed "residents of Europe in the 1990s" as well, because maybe they don't have Mad Cow.

But yes, lots of people died of HIV from tainted blood transfusions in the 80-90s. Isaac Asimov is the famous example that comes to mind, although maybe in some of those cases it was used as a cover story.

There was a joke repeated in And the band played on from the early days of AIDS:

What's the hardest part of getting AIDS? Convincing your wife you're Haitian.

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