The risk of allowing blood donation from men having sex with men after a temporary deferral: predictions versus reality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: In most industrialized countries, men who had sex with men (MSM) are permanently deferred from blood donation. Some countries have adopted a temporary deferral after the MSM behavior, thus avoiding donations made during the window period of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. However, one concern with this approach is the possible increase in the number of HIV-positive donations obtained from unknowingly infected, abstinent MSM; such donations might inadvertently be made available for transfusion, a risk that was previously estimated through mathematical modeling. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS: Model predictions were compared to the actual donor rate of HIV in three countries that went from a permanent to a temporary deferral: Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. RESULTS: Depending on the model, a temporary deferral should have increased the rate of HIV in the male donor pool by 73% to more than 3400%. In reality, the very low baseline rate of HIV before the change in these three countries (22 cases/year) remained unchanged 2 years after the revised policy (16 cases/year). CONCLUSION: These observations strongly suggest that a temporary deferral for MSM incurs zero risk to recipients, at least in jurisdictions where HIV epidemiology is comparable to that of countries where the change happened.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".