Donor screening question alternatives to men who have sex with men time deferral: Potential impact on donor deferral and discomfort
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Alternative screening questions could permit low‐risk men who have sex with men (MSM) to donate blood without a time deferral. We performed a study to determine the proportion of current donors who may be deferred by various questions and their comfort with them. Study Design and Methods Donors attending collection sites in Canada in January and February 2018 were offered one of two questionnaires but not both. Questionnaire 1 asked about risk behaviors; Questionnaire 2 rated comfort with the questions. Volunteers uncomfortable with questions participated in short qualitative telephone interviews to understand reasons. Quantitative data were analyzed using χ2 statistics. Results Of 36 241 donors attending, 31 904 (88%, Period 1) completed Questionnaire 1; of 34 947, a total of 30 278 (87%, Period 2) completed Questionnaire 2; 294 completed an interview. In the past 3 months 3.1% (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.1%‐3.6%) had more than one partner; 6.0% (95% CI, 5.7%‐6.2%) had a new partner; 6.7% (95% CI, 6.4%‐6.9%) were in a nonexclusive relationship; 11.2% (95% CI, 10.9%‐11.6%) had at least one of these; 3.7% (95% CI, 3.4%‐3.9%) had anal sex; and 62.8% (95% CI, 62.2%‐63.3%) had condomless sex. More than 6% were uncomfortable with each question, but more (17.2%; 95% CI, 16.8%‐17.7%) were uncomfortable with anal sex. Key reasons for discomfort were questions being too personal and unclear safety benefit. Conclusion Most donors are comfortable answering alternative questions (except very personal ones) but question the benefit. Implementing alternative questions would result in substantive deferrals. Other policies such as using an MSM capture question to ask additional questions only to MSM should be considered.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".