[Casual]

Last night I came across this article, and it made me think do we have a right to know where transplant organs come from? Should we have the right to refuse organs from a doner based on their lifestyle? When it comes down to it is this a matter of being concerned about what is placed in your body or is this case just an example of bigotry? I'm not here to debate the accuracy of the source material more just the issue it raises. If it was you would you want to know who the doner was? So veteran chefelf debaters, what do you think?

[Spoon Poetic]

Well, being gay does not give one HIV. But it is sadly true that HIV is greater within the "Gay" categorization. I have theories but they all sound bigoted... So I don't really know.

My best theory breaks down like this:
There are more straight people than gay people.
Many of those straight people are tightasses and would never sleep with lots of people.
Gays are typically not tightasses, being that they are breaking away from the mainstream in the first place in admitting to be gay, and here's the part that sounds bigoted, a lot of gays sleep with lots of people. HIV spreads.
There being more straight people than gay people skews the statistics so it looks like being gay = HIV.


I know that sounds awful, but I have observed some of it. Not all, of course, but many gays and bisexuals tend to be "loose," seeing as they are breaking away from mainstream morals in the first place, and are comfortable with themselves, etc. Which would be fine if it weren't for the risk of disease. And a lot of straight people are loose, too, but there's a lot more religious/conservative/etc straight people than gays and they kinda balance the statistics out more favorably for straight people.

And the thing is, since there are more straight people than gays, as well as the difference in mindsets (tightassed right-wingers who think homosexuality and promiscuity is of the devil) the ratio gets all messed up. Let's say half of gay people sleep around a lot, but only a quarter of straight people sleep around a lot. Half of both sleeping-around groups get HIV. Well, that's a quarter of gay people right there, and only an 8th of straight people, so people put up the stats and stuff and it leads people to believe that gay = HIV.

Yeah those numbers are all wrong and I'm just making stuff up, and I've probably already offended someone. But I'm just trying to come up with a reason that the HIV numbers are so much higher within the gay population.

(Someone once presented to me the theory: "Since gays are such sinners, they're often suicidal, so they use drugs to make them feel better, and share needles and stuff, cuz like all gays are druggies to deal with their depression from being sinners, so more gays than straight have HIV." Wow.)

Really I think the HIV numbers are just high in the "people who sleep with lots of other people sans-protection" population.




So in regards to the donor organs thing, can we just ask, "was this person a slut?"

I dunno. My jury is out on this. I don't think people should get names, for sure, since the families of these donors often don't want to see or hear from the person who has their son's heart or whatever, yet the people who got the donation typically want to thank the family.

But if an organ is at high-risk for HIV, that should be told to them, right? I remember I freaked out when I found out my zombie-ACL could give me HIV. They didn't tell me that was a possibility till after they put it in. Before that, I didn't even ever think about tissue and organ transplants spreading HIV, it just never crossed my mind. I know nothing about my new ACL but if they had told me, "the donor ACL we got you has a high risk for HIV" I would have opted for the kind of replacement surgery where they cut off a piece of my muscle and turn that into an ACL.

But the thing is, how do you determine what is high-risk for HIV? Because I really don't think it's fair to say, oh, this person is gay, it automatically has high-risk for HIV.

I'm also wondering, how come gay men can't give blood but they can donate organs? That doesn't make sense to me.

[J m HofMarN]

The reason the rate is higher among gays is because the government doesnt give a fuck about them, and pieces of shit like Ronald Reagan gleefully watched them collapse and die from, what until the early nineties, was known as a gay disease. For a very, very long time screening and aid have lagged behind for homosexuals as opposed to straight people. The callous approach to the problem by Reagan is one of many things that caused AIDs to take on epidemic proportions.

So, we're still seeing the effects of Ronald Rayguns evil policies. Because we allowed the rate of infection to go so high among gays without any thought to treatement or identification, that means there were a lot of them infected that didnt know. Many, many gay advocates have pointed out this issue with a famous gay novelist even suggesting, in the eighties, that those dying of aids should use suicide bombings as a tactic to gain the notice of politicians who were ignoring their plight.

So, no, it isn't just sleeping around.

[Chyld]

I don't know, this seems more like a case of the hospital not screening its donors properly, rather than anything else. If you're dying from a disease that's best cured by an organ transplant, you're not going to go "Eurr, I don't want a gay man's liver". If you'd rather die than stop being a rampant homophobe, works fine by me.

They should have tested the donor better, and that's why she should be able to sue. Nothing more.

[TheOrator]

JM, did Reagan also prevent independent organizations from researching AIDS? Also, what kind of aid are we giving straight people that we are refusing to gays that prevents AIDS?

As for the right-to-refuse bit, organ donation is a voluntary process and you have the right to refuse whatever organs you want, and if the fact is that gays are a high risk for HIV then the person should be notified. In fact, terrible as it may sound, if they are in fact a high-risk group and the screening process isn't perfect, I wouldn't want a kidney from a gay man any more than I'd want a lung from a smoker.

However, I'm not sold on them being a significantly higher risk as no statistics have been presented.

Famous gay novelist? Was it Chuck Palahniuk? I heard he was gay, and damn it that just sounds like something he'd say.

[Spoon Poetic]

Yeah, Jm, I'm not convinced. What on earth was anyone refusing gays that straight people could get? A gay man could get condoms just as easily as a straight man, same with testing, AZT, whatever. Fact is, in the 80s, homosexuals were hugely affected by AIDS while heteros were not. Why this is, I'm not sure, as I was quite little (or not even existing) back then and haven't done much research - but the thing is, it's not like they had a cure for it and they were denying it to gays. It's not like they had preventative measures that were being denied to gays.

Yeah it didn't get as researched and stuff as it would have been, since it was affecting gays so less people cared, but that doesn't explain why it's so much more more prevalent among the gay population. It was ESPECIALLY so back when it first came around.




@Chyld: As far as screening donations - HIV doesn't show up right away sometimes. Of course they test everything for HIV, hence donating blood basically being some people's "free HIV-test." The thing is, a lot of times it can show no HIV, and then a little while later the HIV shows up.





And yeah, if someone's dying from whatever it is, I'd say, better an HIV-infected whatever than nothing. However, there are plenty of transplants where the person could choose to wait a couple more months with little risk and hope for a better organ/tissue, or as in my case, there's no issue of dying so you'd pass the HIV-organ/tissue and wait for another option.

[civilian_number_two]

Yes, of course the gay male community was known in the pre-AIDS-awareness period as being more likely to carry STDs than the straight male community. The community being smaller, the disease spread more readily, in terms of a percentage, than in the larger straight community. And yes, given that these were all men, it was easier to get laid. There are a number of other factors leading to self-desctructive behaviour and end-of-the-world promiscuity, but in the final analysis fags get laid more because guys will fuck anything. The fag community is overall more responsible now wrt to STD prevention than it was in the 80s, but not much less prmiscuous. More straight people now have the virus than gays worldwide, while in North America gays still carry the disease in far greater proportion than straights.

The accusation that Reagan ignored funding AIDS research is unquestionable; it is well-documented that he promoted research in the wake of the death of friend Rock Hudson. Rock was the first celebrity victim, and after his death research kicked in in a big way. The accusation of discrimination is therefore made not due to any evidence of bias (ie Reagan is never quoted as saying that he would deny funding to such research, unlike some of his contemporaries, including his communications director Pat Buchanan who thought that the virus was god's punishment); the accusation is made because the reaction to the death fo a friend drew attention to itself. This is fairly typical; once a politician or a politician's friend gets caught up in somehting, the thing gets more government attention. Because the president's friend was a celebrity as well, AIDS suddenly got a lot of celebrity attention as well.

Orator: who cares what Reagan felt about private organizations? The accusation is that his government did nothing to react to a new disease that killed more than 20000 Americans in the time from its discovery in 1981 to Reagan's first mention of it in 1987 (one year after Hudson's death). Can you imagine any other epidemic receiving such presidential silence? This is the legacy of the Falwell "Moral Majority"years.

I think the donor process should be strict in its screening. You shouldn't be able to get a donor card if you are a member of a known risk group. "Gay" wouldn't be listed as one of these groups, nor would "IV drug user," but there are qualifying questions that would place you in such a group, such as number of partners in the last calendar year (more than 1 is high risk), and needle-sharing (ever done that = high risk). These are questions they ask you when you donate blood.

I wouldn't want a system whereby folks could screen their donors, mainly because this would likely mean that organs would rot while people made up their minds. I just want a screening process that works to limit transmission of disease. In this case, the donor's organ was tested and screened, but the disease was not found. This system, with one incident in 20 years, I consider this a system that works.

[J m HofMarN]

Orator- He refused funding, or even to acknowledge the problem, for quite some time. The government should have fulfilled its obligations to citizens regardless of sexual orientation. If AIDs had only effected Jews at first, and Reagan had passed it off as "that Jew disease" can you imagine the scandal that would have brought? Reagan, besides being an utter scum fuck, also had good reason to dislike gays after events like the Stonewall Uprising that occured while he was the governor in California.

Spoon- Ok, so aids effected the gay community first. We can agree on that. I believe it was due to a lack of anyone trying to mount a campaign against the problem or educate people, either due to apathy or to a desire to kill queers. And the reason aids rates went up among gay people and didnt spread so quickly among straight people was that the first infections were in gays, and gays tend to be, ya know, gay... with other gay people. So, the government figured it was solely their problem and that good, clean god loving Americans would be safe. Only when straight folks started dying did the pigs start to care.

[barend]

Uh... huh.

Let's make this a little simpler.

The resaon AIDS is more rampant in the gay "Community" is beacuse the main reason people wear condoms is to prevent pregnancy. Something that is not a high priority fear amongst men who do men.

Also... EVERYONE gets laid in the rainbow universe because men are less superficial than women, there I said it.

EDIT: Also, I don't want the lungs of a smoker, the liver of an alcholic, the eyes of anyone who watches reality TV, the eardrums of midrifts, kidney's of a shut in, bone marrow from stunt driver, etc.

This post has been edited by barend: 19 November 2008 - 07:19 PM

[Casual]

The point is that the hospital did test for these conditions but both were in too early a stage to be caught so I wonder how responsible they really are? Sometimes you can do everything right and it still goes horribly wrong. I just think that if she had known who she was getting the organ from and she had refused it she would be better off, however as chyld said there's no point in dying because your a homophobe. Still until we stop letting the Christians make decisions about stem cell research this horribly flawed method of organ transplant will have to continue.

[Dr Lecter]

Erm, there is also the fact that STIs are more easily transmitted through anal sex... Not to mention the higher risk cutting oneselve, causing blood transfusion. There is also the fact that the odds of a man contracting an STI from women is lower than any other combination of partners (women are more likely to get it from men than men than they are from women).

*edit* Not too sure about women to women actually. Can't remember what the odds were on that.

This post has been edited by Dr Lecter: 19 November 2008 - 07:33 PM

[barend]

Also...

Gays are typically not tightasses

tee hee hee hee

[Duke Aeon]

Most people's ideas about gay sex are absolutely retarded. We do not play "The buccaneer's buddy" at every chance we get, sex for most of us is more like stroking each other and swallowing salamis, anal sex being something very special, I've only ever done it with my current boyfriend. We do not use a condom because we've both had a checkup. Some people might go the anal route more than me, but they may wind up with their asses destroyed, maybe this is just evolution in "the post AIDS gay community." I don't know too much about the current studies, even though the "gay community" seems to carry the cross, I have yet to see the kind of behavior those studies suggest within my relationships.

What about black people? Going by No Queer Organs Thx, one should not want black organs either, seeing as they are 12% of the US population (along the lines of the gay population) and this is how AIDS breaks down racially:

That sure is close to the majority!

[Spoon Poetic]

Well you have to admit gays aren't typically going to be conservative. And conservatives are the ones who are usually too goody-two-shoes to have sex very often/with multiple partners/not missionary/etc. And your experience with sex is completely different from the majority of my gay buddies' as well as the majority of my very large university's Gay-Straight Alliance attendees. I was just speaking from my personal experience, and it was just a theory, and it could very well be that the gays I come into contact with are not the norm. We are in the Bible Belt, after all, where people who don't fit in have a tendency to go as far in the other direction as possible. I don't know, I'm just puzzled about why the numbers are so much higher in the gay population. I tried to figure it out given the limited info I have. I did not mean to be offensive.

Also, if that graph is indicative of just the U.S., then if people got wind of it they might start wanting to refuse black organs, because they're stupid like that. But I'm guessing that's a worldwide graph, representing Africa with AIDS running rampant no matter what sexuality, due to lack of education and protection. So I don't think race will be an issue with organ donations at this point in time, since no one's gonna get an organ from Africa anyway.

I still want to know, though - why the hell can a gay man donate a fucking necessary bodily organ but they are turned away from giving blood??

[barend]

What the hell is the Gay-Straight Alliance? What do we need that for? Balck, white, gay straight... the only two groups opposing each other should be boys and girls.