Discursive History of Screening Criteria for Blood Donation Affecting Gay, Bi, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men in Canada: 1983–2013
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In September 2022, Canadian Blood Services (CBS) implemented a sexual behaviour–based screening (SBBS) approach for all donors, putting an end to Canada’s “gay blood ban.” Analysis: To better understand the discursive history leading up to this change, this article analyzes articles in major newspapers and 2SLGBTQIA+ periodicals in Canada from 1983 to 2013 related to the ban. Conclusions and implications: The move to SBBS came about due not only to advancements in epidemiological knowledge and testing technologies, but also to significant shifts in how the issues were framed in public discourse.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".