Who Can Donate Blood Outdated?
The victim of a car accident can require as many as 100 pints of blood—that’s blood from 100 generous donors across the country, meticulously matched for blood type and screened for diseases. More than 38,000 blood donations are needed daily in the U.S., but only 38 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, and of those, only 8 percent actually do. The list of eligibility criteria that a donor must meet is long, ranging from simple characteristics such as age and weight requirements to more complex ones surrounding medical and travel history. Among them is the risk for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Certain factors thought to increase this risk, including illicit intravenous drug use and, if you’re a man, having had sex with another male even once since 1977, currently prohibit you from ever donating blood.* But AIDS research pioneers from the Jewish General Hospital and McGill University in Montreal think the ban is
