Regulating the Risk of Blood-borne Related Infections: Men Who Have Sex with Men Deferral Policy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Canada, from 1989 to 2013, a man who had had sex with another man (MSM), even once since 1977, was categorically excluded from the blood donor pool. Although the LGBTTQ community and student groups argued that this exclusion, based solely on sexual orientation, was discriminatory and promoted homophobic attitudes, the painful legacy of the tainted blood scandal and the desire to maintain public trust in the blood supply, prevented Canadian Blood Services from relaxing the eligibility. The recent changes to the MSM blood deferral policy primarily aimed to align the ban with new epidemiological evidence of risk. Implicitly, another goal was to increase blood supply by enhancing young Canadian's perception of blood services, prompting them to become regular donors. An extensive consultation process, lasting almost a decade, was necessary to reach a compromise amongst patient groups opposed to changes to the legislation, and the LGBTTQ and student groups who wanted to eliminate the deferral for MSM altogether and reform screening practices. A consensus amongst high interest groups was reached in 2013, resulting in the implementation of a 5-year deferral (meaning MSM become eligible donors after five years without sex with other men) and three years later, a change to a 1-year deferral. The changes to the deferral policy have had a small impact on net blood supply; nevertheless, they have succeeded at improving donor compliance, satisfying activists, and advancing the possibility of introducing novel and improved screening tools that tackle the risk inherent in sexual practices rather than the risk related to sexual orientation.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".