Cain v Australian Red Cross Society: the case for universal blood donation reform.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article reports on a recent Australian decision in which an Anti-Discrimination Tribunal was asked to rule on whether the exclusion of homosexual men from blood donation amounted to discrimination. While the tribunal ultimately found that the Red Cross's policy of "deferring" all donors who are men who have sex with men (MSM) within the last 12 months was "reasonable", the case is an important step forward for advocates of blood donation reform, given the consensus reached by many of the experts who gave evidence and importantly the tribunal's implicit rejection of the MSM donor deferral policies of most of the world's industrialised countries, including the United States of America, Canada and much of continental Europe. The article concludes by calling on governments, research institutes and universities to initiate the needed medical and sociological studies so that ultimately blood donor suitability is determined on the specific question of sexual behaviour and not the clumsy, awkward and ultimately discriminatory MSM question that remains in operation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".