Gay blood ban 'discrimination'

madanthonywayne said:
Do you honestly think that any test is 100% accurate? Ever hear of false positives or false negatives?
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No, even when you are pregnant and run different tests and screenings. They never say anything is 100%. It is always something like 98.6%, 99.3% etc.

They also sometimes come back with false positives or negatives when screening for down syndrome and such. I had a g/f once that got one of those.
She went back to be retested again and it was normal the second time around.
 
Asguard said:
actually i think you overestimate the risk mad

acording to this artical a 20% increase (across the board) in queensland equals 20 new cases. that means the adverage infection rate for queensland is 100 cases, not very high at all

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/28/1053801448420.html
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Do you realize, Asguard, that you've just sealed my case? If the overall rate of infection for HIV is 100 per 4 million (the population of Queensland) compared with a male homosexual rate as high as 20 per 100, the effect of including male homosexual donors is staggering!

Let's run thru the numbers again. If the figure you gave me was correct for the population as a whole, the expected number of HIV positive donors among 10,000 would be 0.0000071. Now compare that with the 2,000 HIV positive results among 10,000 urban male homosexuals.

In my earlier example, I assumed a 1% false negative rate for the HIV screening (EIA) used by the Red Cross on blood donors. I just pulled that number out of my ass. Just now I tried to find out what the real number is, but couldn't find any data on false negatives. Probably no one wants to know! I did find this study having to do with the false negatives for clostridium difficile using the same test (EIA) that the Red Cross uses to screen for HIV:
The total number of stool samples tested by all three methods was 143. Chart review was done on patients with discordant test results.RESULTS: [table: see text] The Prospec II gave 4 false positive (FP) and 3 false negative (FN) results, compared to Tox A/B with 1 FP and 19 FN results. http://gateway.nlm.nih.gov/MeetingAbstracts/ma?f=102245185.html
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That's horrible! According to this study, the EIA has a false negative rate of 2-13%!

Of course it may well be that these particular EIA's aren't as good as the one's used for the screening of blood donors. So, in the absence of better data, let's just stick with the 1% false negative rate.

So, as before, with the urban male homosexuals, we'd expect 2,000 HIV positive donors. If our test had 1% false negatives, this would mean 20 donors with HIV would slip thru.

Compare this to the 0.07 expected HIV positive donors per 10,000 in thte general population. If we missed 1% of these, we'd expect 0.0007 HIV positive donors to slip thru per 10,000. Way less than one.

Can you see how including a high risk group profoundly increases the chances of tainted blood slipping thru? This is why male homosexual donors are excluded.
 
ummm i just posted the WHOLE infection rate, including IV drug users, homosexuals, needle sticks, even mother to babies

i dont know where you got 20 per hundred from
i said there was a 20% INCREASE in cases in queensland and that translated in raw numbers to 20 NEW CASES PERIOD
 
who the hell cares what happens in the US, if you want to argue that this isnt discrimination under australian law you need epidemiological data from

try the ABS or the who
 
I don't like how this assumes that all gay men are going around having anal sex without restraint.
 
Asguard said:
who the hell cares what happens in the US, if you want to argue that this isnt discrimination under australian law you need epidemiological data from

try the ABS or the who
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Well, look at this:
And if you look at the percentage of homosexuals and bisexuals in the population, the latest authoritative survey, done by La Trobe University, was 2.5 per cent of the population. http://www.abc.net.au/stateline/sa/content/2003/s1262743.htm
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So, according to this Australian source, 2.5% of the population of Australia is homosexual. Now let's throw this in (also from an Australian site):
Transmission in Australia continues to occur primarily through sexual contact between men.
Around 61% of people newly diagnosed with HIV infection in the period 2002-2006 were men with a history of homosexual contact http://www.avert.org/ausstatg.htm
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So homosexuals (I assume that would include male homosexuals and lesbians, so the number is actually closer to 1% I'd assume) comprise perhaps 2.5% of the Australian population yet make up 61% of new HIV infections. This would imply that the relative risk for homsexuals is 24 times higher! So my earlier statements still apply, although the specifics are a little different.
 
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