Bibliographic record
Abstract
In order to ensure the safety of the blood supply, potential blood donors in Canada are screened for eligibility prior to making a donation. This process includes answering a series of questions intended to identify those at higher risk of carrying transfusion-transmissible pathogens. Prior to 2013, male donors who had had sex with another man, even once, since 1977 were banned for life from donating blood. From 2013 onward, men who have sex with men (MSM) could donate blood provided that they had not had sex with another man for five years. This policy has been criticized, both before and after the policy change in 2013, as being discriminatory and not based on current scientific knowledge and practices. This paper describes and analyzes the evolution of the MSM blood donation policy in Canada. The analysis shows that Canadian Blood Services, the organization in charge of the blood supply, prioritized blood safety and the perspectives of blood recipients above all others, which led them to take a particularly cautious approach in deciding when and how to change the policy. The analysis also reveals that the policy was finally able to change in 2013 because of the accumulation of research, the engagement of high-interest stakeholder groups, and shifts in the perceived costs and benefits of maintaining the status quo vs. changing the MSM blood donation policy. Examining the costs and benefits of a policy change for blood recipients and the MSM community suggests that what is needed for the policy to change in the future is more research into alternative screening criteria which can maintain the safety and adequacy of the blood supply.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".