If you aren’t man enough to debate your lies in public, I will just settle for the smashing weekend

Have a good ‘un.

Mike

If you’re man enough to talk on the telephone, drop me your telephone number.

Otherwise, have a smashing weekend and take care.

Best Regards

Russell

I forgot to mention that the main page of your BloodBan site has two rather conspicuous lies on it. You state:

“Intravenous Drug users can give blood after 1 year. Prostitute users can give blood after 1 year.”

BOTH of those groups (even if they only accepted money once, or injected drugs once) have exactly the same lifetime exclusion that men who have sex with men do. That fact is available for all to see on the NBS website: https://secure.blood.co.uk/c11_cant.asp

THT also confirm this in the document I quote from in my post:

“Similar lifetime bans exist for injecting drug users and people who have at any time been paid for sex. Again, this is based on activities that may have put them at risk, not discrimination.”

If you check again, you will see that the twelve month prostitute exclusion very clearly refers to the person having sex with a prostitute.

Actually, it is three lies. Gay men aren’t banned if they haven’t been sexually active.

OOOPS .. make that four lies. It isn’t law. None of these exclusions are written in law (nor indeed any other statutory instrument). They are simply NBS rules that the person offering to donate blood, or bone marrow, agrees to abide by.

.. so, lovely as I am sure you are, I still can’t help but conclude that whole BloodBan thing is basically big on claims .. and so desperately short on substance that you have had to resort to telling blatant lies, and making up false facts, in order to get 938 people (several hundred of them invalid, because they don’t give an address in the UK) to even sign your little petition. Do you think that will give the petition much credibility when you hand it in?

Mike

Before I respond to your points, I can’t resist commenting on the fact that WordPress’ spam filter claims your comment is spam. What have you been up to?

You claim in your comment that your exact point is that those statistics, along with the ban, have nothing to do with you as an individual. As THT correctly point out, it has everything to do with you as an individual; because you are still a man who has sex with men.

Following Peter Twatchell’s example in using weasel words like ’stereotypical’ don’t do your argument much good either, because it isn’t stereotyping – it is about solid and incontestable statistical probabilities. It may be crude, but crude profiling isn’t stereotyping.

It is unfortunate that we have to rely on such crude measures to maintain both the safety of the blood supply and the public confidence in that safety .. and it is also unfortunate that you as an individual are therefore prevented from something you would like to do.

Your equally unfortunate and misguided response to being prevented from doing that is to cry homophobia – where there is no homophobia – and to demand an immediate and unconditional end to the ban .. and that is the problem that I and so many other gay men have with your campaign. You are crying wolf when there is no wolf in sight. Nothing you say will ever change that regrettable fact.

We can’t escape the fact that even the best (and still unbelievably expensive) testing technology still isn’t up to the job of doing what you demand of it .. so we are left with little choice but to use probabilities.

Contrary to what you claim (and don’t back up, but just expect us to believe), even promiscuous straight men are not a higher risk. You keep using this argument about the straight man with “52 unprotected sexual partners in the past year”; but you seem totally incapable of comprehending the simple fact that even the straight man who is staggeringly promiscuous still has a much lower probability of contracting HIV .. let alone contracting HIV AND not having any of the common symptoms of acute infection (which, if you read up on those symptoms, and check the NBS questionnaire, would disqualify ANYONE from donating blood) AND trying to donate blood during the window period.

The same can’t be said for a gay man .. even a gay man who THINKS he is in a monogamous relationship (and it is staggering just how many of us – myself included – become HIV-positive from within a supposedly monogamous relationship where both partners tested conclusively HIV-negative before we started having unprotected sex).

You could argue that we should change the screening questions to make them more sensitive. That has already been tried too (in Sweden), with the result that the questions got so complicated huge numbers of people with no significant risk factors ended up disqualifying themselves .. and people with high risk factors genuinely thought they qualified to give blood. That would have meant even less blood with a higher risk to the supply.

You are also ignoring the fact that lifting the ban wouldn’t actually do an awful lot to resolve the NBS’s blood supply problems. The donors they are short of are those from certain ethnic minorities (I notice you conveniently leave that last crucial little nugget out of your justifications).

OK, so we are still left with the fact that technology has moved on a little since the rules were last reviewed. If your campaign was framed in such a way as to ask for a review of the ban in light of the latest implemented testing technology at the National Blood Service (which they in any case committed to long before you even started your campaign), I would be right behind you .. but that isn’t what you are asking for. You demand that they skip the review, capitulate and just end the ban unconditionally .. and you attach all sorts of banal claims to the justification for them doing that.

I am sure you are much better at selling flowers than I ever will be; but something tells me that I have the edge when it comes to understanding HIV, so you aren’t going to convince me on this one .. and will I give my ex directory phone number out to a complete stranger? Now that would make me as stupid as I claim your argument is, wouldn’t it?

Mike

I’m Russell Hirst, the illogical dimwit behind BloodBan.co.uk.

I appreciate the statistics that you quote in your posting, however they have nothing to do with myself as an individual person and that is the exact point here.

I am not promiscuous. Some gay men are; some straight men are. Some straight women are, some gay women are. It doesn’t matter what sexuality the person is – their eligibility to give blood should be based on their OWN personal lifestyle and not on the stereotypical view of their sexuality and it’s associated behaviours.

Other high-risk groups are at an equal, if not increased, risk of passing HIV into the blood stocks – for example, straight guys who have unprotected sex with a different woman every weekend, intravenous drug users, prostitute users – or those who have had unprotected sex in an East African country. Those people are NOT banned for life – in fact such straight men are never banned, even if they admit to having had 52 unprotected sexual partners in the past year, whilst the other groups are banned for only 12 to 18 months – never for life.

Therefore, why is a lifetime ban applied to me, when people in the above groups have a maximum exclusion of just 18 months, yet they pose the same risks?

The fact is that in this day and age, with the medical science available, aligning whole droves of the British public into ‘risk groups’ is not acceptable and should not be happening. The ban has been dropped in several other countries recently – it is my opinion that the only thing holding it back here in the UK is cost.

This is to the detriment of our UK blood stocks and is putting lives at risk.

If more money was spent on advanced screening techniques, and if donors were simply allowed to be honest, then any person – regardless of their sexuality – would be able to give blood as the screening process would eradicate any infected blood from entering the UK stocks. Then, the UK would no longer be ‘dangerously low’ in it’s blood stocks – which is the ultimate goal of the campaign.

The cost of this advanced screening could be offset against the savings made on the National Blood Service’s marketing expenditure, which with more healthy men able to give blood could obviously be scaled down.

If you’d like to discuss this verbally, please drop me an email with your telephone number. Although, being a dimwit, it may take me a while to figure out how to dial it.

Best Regards

Russell Hirst

http://sinblancaporelmundo.wordpress.com/2008/03/12/de-maricones-y-de-gays/

If that comment represents the true impotence of your argument, then you really must be having a desperately hard time finding any of these supposed “lies” – but thanks for your eloquent illustration of the level of intellect dimwit that the BloodBan campaign clearly appeals to.

As for getting a grip .. if I didn’t already have a firm grip, how on earth could I be a “wanker”?

Happy trolling, Arsewipe