Among the things most essential to a university researcher, government grant money ranks pretty high on the list. Yet for three years, a half-million-dollar grant has sat untouched by scientists in Canada.
The reason isn’t clear, but the grant proposal seeks evidence that would help the Canadian government end a ban on blood donations by gay men, and a couple of researchers at the University of Montreal suggest that the lack of applicants shows prejudice.
The case, with public-health implications, “could suggest a particular bias underlying researchers’ choices,” write Vardit Ravitsky, an assistant professor of bioethics, and Jason Behrmann, a doctoral candidate in bioethics, in Monday’s online edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
Some of their colleagues, however, aren’t so sure. Instead, they suggest this might be a case where government officials are afraid to make a politically sensitive decision and have set up researchers to take the blame.
“I can’t say for certain that’s what’s happening here,” said Gary J. Gates, a researcher at the Charles R. Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But it’s hardly an unusual thing that happens around” policy decisions involving sexual orientation, he said. “And often, they’re asking for things in the research when lots of other policies are created without that level of certainty.”
Canada is among several countries, including the United States, that impose a lifetime ban on blood donations by men who have had sex with other men. The U.S. policy is set by the federal Food and Drug Administration, which has cited data showing the rate of HIV infection among men who have had sex with other men is 60 times that of the general population.
But in other countries, such as Australia, Japan, and Sweden, a gay man can donate blood if he has had only one sexual partner in the previous year. And others, such as Spain and Italy, have policies based on the safety of sexual practices rather than the genders involved.
219,000 Pints of Blood
The proposed research grant, offered by the Canadian Blood Services and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, seeks a statistical analysis of the risks to recipients of adjusting the country’s policy on blood donations by gay men. The Canadian government requires the analysis before it can consider any changes in the policy, Ms. Ravitsky and Mr. Behrmann said.
A study last year by Mr. Gates and colleagues at UCLA found that completely lifting the U.S. ban would increase the blood supply by 219,000 pints a year, or 1.4 percent. The change also would allow an additional 903 organ donations each year, the study found.
Ms. Ravitsky and Mr. Behrmann state that the Canadian restrictions “unduly limit the supply of an already limited medical resource,” although the researchers do not say the blood-supply shortages have actually cost any lives. They instead describe the consequences largely as matters of fairness and equity, saying gay men should have “the chance to contribute” and end “the perception that members of the gay community are freeloaders who benefit from a resource without contributing to it.”
Some researchers told the authors they had not pursued the grant because they believed that the odds of HIV transmission from a gay blood donor, given modern methods of screening donated blood for pathogens, are so low that quantifying the exact risk would require a forbiddingly complex set of mathematical computations. “Embedded in this explanation is the fact that the risk is so low that the policy’s not justified,” Ms. Ravitsky said.
Ms. Ravitsky also suggested that while the grant had been publicized through usual processes, the government could have tried harder to attract attention. The expectation of a very low level of risk from gay blood donors also suggests the government could have done more to educate the public about how to evaluate risk levels, she said.
AIDS experts at the nearby McGill University AIDS Center said they agreed the government could have done more to promote the grant and make it attractive, and challenged the assumption of bias among reseachers. The job of proving that monogamous gay couples do not represent a risk to the blood supply might require far more than a half million dollars, said the AIDS center’s director, Mark A. Wainberg, a professor of medicine and microbiology at McGill.
“Given that the numbers of such couples may be relatively small compared to the larger gay community,” he said, “it is even difficult to imagine how such a study could be carried out.”
