Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Update: Blood Donation

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

Recently, the FDA has updated their guidelines on who can donate blood and when – an update that has long been demanded. So we bring the full episode about Dr. Charles Drew and the history of blood donation, along with the new guidelines and why these changes were finally made.Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers https://taxpayers.bandcamp.com/

Hi, y'all, it's Justin. And it's Sydney. We've had some interesting developments in the world of blood donation. And we are going to talk to you about some of the new guidelines because it means a lot of people who maybe couldn't get blood before, all right, we'll be able to, but to do that, we're going to do first is play you an episode about blood donation that we have already done. It's called Charles Drew. Yes, absolutely.

And at the end of the episode, we will be back to tell you about some of these new updates. It's fascinating story. Hope you enjoy it. And we'll talk to you in just a few. Saw bones is a show about medical history and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth.

You're worth it. You're worth it. Alright, Tommy is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Saw Bones a marinalital Tour of Miscite, Adminisson. I'm your co-host Justin McRoy. And I'm Sydney McRoy. And today we're going to be celebrating a very special month, the month that I Justin McRoy became a notary public. Just got the paperwork through today.

It's very exciting. A lot of people are talking about it. And gosh, February. That's not the most important thing to celebrate this moment. I want to say February, people should take a moment, look around and remember, I wasn't always a notary public. You were on the inside.

That's true. I do have a very notary public vibe. Yeah, yeah. Justin gives off that feeling of like, guys a notary, I bet. I bet that guys. I need guys are notary, I bet. I bet that guys. I need something notarized.

I bet I should call Justin McRoy. I bet he. I don't know that you know that, I don't know that that's necessarily my podcast persona is like guy who should be a notary, but like if you know me personally, that is 100% of my level. Yeah.

That is where I'm at. Guy who's probably a notary. And now is. And now he's be correct. He is a notary. No, Justin. February is not about you. Everything's about you. Sorry, February is not about you.

It's black history month, you know that. I know. Yeah. It's having some fun. Yes. And, you know, because it is black history month, I thought, we would do something that we don't often get to do on saw bones, which is talk about someone in medical history who did good stuff.

Wow, always nice to hear. Not usually we're talking about when you come up as a figure of interest on our show. Yeah, if you don't want Sydney, you want Sydney to keep your name out of mouth. Now we've done this before. We've talked about other famous people in medical history who actually did good stuff and contributed and that kind of thing.

So this isn't the first time, but I thought that this would be particularly timely because not only can we celebrate an amazing black physician in history, but we can also emphasize the importance of blood donation at the same time because as you may be aware, we're in dire straits in much of the country in terms of blood banking supplies. Yeah, it is not, it is not, now some people are doing their part. Yes, like you.

Yeah, I know you wanted to brag about that. It's, you know, I just got the notification that my blood is headed to, God, it's headed to WVU, to be used in the medical center there. I do wish that I could have somehow indicated that that's the blood of an odory. I mean, it wasn't when it was extracted,

so I don't know if it's quite the same thing. But like next time I donate, I'll be sure, like, can you please put an in on there? For no to repeat. For no to repeat, public or anything'll be sure to like, can you please put an in on their for notary public or something like that? Yeah, okay. Because I want people to know. You want people to know. It's a wonderful experience.

We'll talk more about that in Urju if you can to consider donating blood at the end. But it is a wonderful experience. I donated blood once overseas and had the opportunity to actually like take my bag of blood from my body and hang it on an IV pole and help. Well, I didn't hook it up because I am not as good at that as the nurse that I was working with. They hooked it up. But I got to I got to do that and it was such an amazing feeling and you can get that blow. That's a said, the vessel blood just goes straight. You can't get fresher than that. No, it was still warm.

It was still warm from a vein. But anyway, we have done an episode before about the history of blood transfusions back in 2015 when we were so young, naive, had no idea what was in store. So if you wanna hear the whole history of all the dumb stuff we did, before we figured out blood transfusions and all of our attempts, that is detailed in that episode. I don't want to go back and talk about all of that again. But I did think, like I said, this was a really good opportunity to talk about blood donation,

blood banking, and celebrate the work of Dr. Charles Drew. Okay. Which when I say Dr. Drew, I'm talking Dr. Carl's Drew. We're talking about the good one. No good one, the famous American physician, surgeon, blood scientist expert who is the father of blood banking, as you know it. Not love line it. Not.

Love line doctor. No, who I think has said some sort of. He said some things were not going to get in. We're not going to get in for that doctor. Dr. Drow. No, no. Dr. Charles Drew was born in Washington, DC in 1904, the oldest of five children.

He studied at Amherst College, and then he worked as a professor of biology and chemistry for a couple of years at Morgan College to save money for medical school When he applied to medical school he decided to go to McGill University in Montreal for his medical training and While he was there he would work alongside a doctor John BT now I tried to find out more about Dr. John BT. And I couldn't find a lot of documentation of his work there

because I kind of wanted some context for, I knew he was working on treatments for shock and what was he doing and what was his history. Apparently, there is, because we're in Canada, right? Apparently, there is also because we're in Canada, right? Apparently, there is also a John Bede in Canada who was associated with like neo-nazies. So it was really hard to research this specific John Bede. So I can't tell you much about him,

but he was a guy who was a doctor working there who was interested in how can we treat shock. Now, do you know what shock is? I mean, I understand basically, it's when you got, you received too much of something input wise. Yeah. Be that temperature or visual or whatever. And it makes your body go, whoa. Okay. Well, that's different. that temperature or visual or whatever, and it makes your body go, whoa. Okay, well that's different than the shock I'm talking about.

That is a shock, yes. I am talking about like medical shock, like the condition of, and there's different. I'm like, what am I talking about? No, like, okay. Shock is a- He's in shock, you know what I mean? Yeah, but that's not when you're- He just defeated Holmes Goober.

Yeah, that's when you're like, he's in shock. He's in shock. There are different types of shock, medical shock, and they're usually distinguished by like the cause. Like septic shock is when you're septic probably from, or well, from an infection of some sort. Should they probably that you are?

Are you having infection? You've become septic and you can go into shock from that. There's hemorrhagic shock, which is you lose a lot of blood and you go into shock. Basically, the idea is that you're not getting blood and therefore oxygen to a lot of parts of your body. All at the same time, your blood pressure will drop. You can start to have multi-organ damage. It's a big deal, right? It is deadly if not treated. Shock. No matter what the cause is, you got to do something about it. The treatment of shock is different from shock treatment. Those are two similar sounding concepts that are completely different. No, this has nothing to do with electricity, like shocks.

This is different. Okay. So basically what he was looking at is, in a lot of these cases, you need to put volume back in the vascular system. You need to put something back in to maintain blood pressure, to keep blood flowing to the organs to keep you know you from Going into kidney death and liver death and brain death and everything dying, right?

Right If for instance, it's because you're bleeding a lot then you need to put blood in there. Yeah So that's the solution for a lot of these conditions. We need to put blood or There's lots of options we have now. I don't know if you have any of those. I'm not sure. I don't know if you have any of these. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Gatorate? No, not gatorate. GDI? Well, you don't, I mean, you can drink pidiolite, but that, but like when somebody's wanted to shock, you don't have time to be like, go get me a case of pidiolite. What about bronidone? No.

So, okay, at this point in history, the idea of just someone needs blood, give it to them is not that simple, okay? Here's why. So, we knew already about the concept of blood transfusions. And like I said, a lot of this we talked about in a past episode, but just to kind of sum up so you know where we are. We had, like I said, we had already known about it for about 100 years. Dr. James Blundel was a British obstetrician who during a delivery

where the patient was losing a lot of blood. He actually took blood out of the patient's husband, the father of a child, took blood from him and injected it into her. Quick. Hey, shout out to the people who were choosing their obstetrician and there was some name blood, Dr. Blundel, and they were like, sounds good.

Dr. Blundel guarantees to drop your baby just the regular amount. No matter what, even though it sounds like I'm pulling by freaking Rowan Adkinson, I'm trusting. I'm a regular good doctor. And he was one of the early pioneers of blood transfusion. Good. Despite the name Dr. Blondle. So.

Dr. Blondle sounds like a pudding doctor. So this was back in 1818. And this is obviously not how we do blood transfusions today. We don't just randomly like, here, let me draw some blood from you and inject it straight into you. Good, good work. Like, we wouldn't do that now. But this was like the first attempt at these things.

And since then, there had been a lot of research done in that area to try to make the process better, to do like whole blood transfusions. So not just like, like he literally had drawn a few CCs of blood from the one person and injected into the other person. So like doing whole blood transfusions for patients with hemophilia, that was one of the first areas where they really tried this. Discovering blood types at this point in really tried this. Discovering blood types. At this point in history, we already know about blood types. We know about in transfusion reactions,

if you don't use the right type, what can happen. We have the concept of matching somebody's type and also crossing the blood. Like, let's take blood from the donor and blood from who we're gonna give the blood to, the recipient, and put it together and make sure nothing crazy happens. Like, we had already sort of figured a lot of that stuff out. We had briefly tried some weird stuff,

like, why don't we transfuse milk into people? Oh, yeah. That wasn't great. There were a lot of reactions from the transfusion of, it was like cow or human milk. So we weren't doing that. We had figured out saling at this point that if somebody just needs volume, you just need more stuff to keep. It's just saltwater. The doctors come up

saying it's new for it, but it's just saltwater. And we even knew about like ocean. There's other stuff in the ocean. Sailing is like just saltwater. Mermin, coral, mystery. We even knew about like universal donors. And we knew about anti-clotting stuff, like sodium citrate that you can put in there so that the blood won't clop in the bag. Cause that was a big problem at first was like, you don't have a lot of time.

Here it is, I'm ready to save your life with my bag of scabs. Well, I mean, that really would have been a problem. That was why it was like direct. Well, you're right. You don't have to actually shock every time I say something. This is apropos to the conversation. But this allowed for like,

you could store the blood for short periods of time. Very short, we're talking a couple days. Like, you could store the blood for short periods of time. Very short. We're talking a couple days. Like, you still don't have blood banking abilities, but you at least don't have to take it directly out of one person and put it into another. They even tried for a while like, showing a vein from one person to an artery of another person to like, have the blood flow. Direct hookup.

Yeah. Like, but that didn't work very well. But it was, it was very important important to organ transplantation science later. So it was a really big thing that they did, but that didn't really help blood transfusion. Anyway, so if a patient needs blood and you've got a couple of units that you've stored for a couple of days or whatever, great, but in an emergency, when maybe multiple people need blood product or somebody needs more than just a few units, this is not ideal, right? A lot of hospitals are not going to be able to maintain

that and do this. So because he worked with this John Beatty at McGill on this sort of shock treatment and, well, treatment of shock and that kind of thing, he was already aware of this problem. This was already something that he was interested in. He'd studied, he had knowledge about, as he continued his career. He graduated with a medical degree and a master of surgery from McGill, and he went to work initially as a professor of pathology

at Howard, and then as a surgical instructor and assistant at Friedman's hospital. But in 1938, this is really when he kind of took all that knowledge and experience and he would sort of embark on the science that would define his career. He was a Rockefeller scholar at Columbia and while he was there, he devoted the research on what he would eventually earn his doctorate in is blood sciences, which I didn't know that was its own. I think that's a very cool thing. Like, I am a doctor blood science. Pretty good. I think that's a very cool thing. Yeah. So he's already a medical doctor. He's getting also, this is like a PhD. He's getting

another doctorate. I've had the interview process to make sure you're not a vampire for that is like wild. Like, because of course you would be, you know what I mean? Like a lot of vampires are trying to get a blood science. A lot of them are saying number one. Number one interest. I don't know what girls me too. I don't know if you'd want to, I mean, that well, I guess vampires are kind of arrogant

because I would say like why wouldn't you just want to like something that wouldn't be too high profile, just like volunteer at a blood bank or something? Or like, you know what I mean? We need to kind of like, fly under the radar. If you volunteer at a blood bank, someone's taking inventory of that, right? So if you're sipping off a pint,

go to a place with a quality or whatever you do, your people are gonna notice that pretty quickly. But if they're giving it to you, if you're like, I need all this for research, trust me. Then no one's gonna check up on you. I guess that's true. And you could- I need all this for research.

And I guess you could just say, well, it didn't work. I tried. I don't have anything published. Sometimes it doesn't work. I'm standing on the shoulders of giant. He, so okay, so anyway. He took all of his knowledge. He earned his doctorate and his dissertation was titled, Banked Blood, a study in blood preservation. So basically, he took a lot of the sort of the basic science that was being done on these areas of separating

blood and storing blood and preserving blood and what he figured out from all this and what he developed on his own was a method of separating out the components of blood. So what we think of as whole blood, which is like I just took some blood from your arm. There's the blood whole the whole thing all the blood. It can only be kept for so long but if you take out the cells and then you've got the plasma, everything else, separate, that if dried or nowadays frozen appropriately can be kept a lot longer. So all of a sudden you go from a couple days to a few months that you can store this stuff, right? And you can reconstitute it when you need it.

So you keep it in storage and when you need to, you know, reliquify it, you can do that. You can combine it with cells if you need whole blood again, or you can just give people plasma. Sometimes I don't want to get another particular, but sometimes you can just give people plasma. Well, I mean, there's, so nowadays, just to flash forward a little bit. Nowadays, we have lots of options for do people need like packed red blood cells right now? Do they need fresh frozen plasma? Do they need cryoprecipited? Like there are lots of different sort of,

and it depends on what's going on with the patient. You can do, they have like different like platelets. They have one called power red, which is that you could do when you sign up. I didn't go this route, but it's, they, a special machine is used to allow you to safely donate two units of red blood cells during one donation and then they give you

the plasma and platelets back. Yes. It's like, if you wanna get real, if you wanna level up the donation, you want to level up your blood donation, you go to Power Red. And what we're talking about right now with Dr. Drew is like the beginning of that. This is where all this idea started,

and which really allows us to best utilize the blood that's donated, right? So that we can get people, the parts they really need, save it for as long as it's safe. You know, make sure it's off screen properly, make sure it's matched properly. I mean, like this is the beginning of all that sort of thought process. So this was his dissertation. This is the science that he was sort of spearheading. What did he do with it? I will tell you, but first we got to go to the billion departments.

Let's go. The medicines that ask you let my God before the mouth. You probably already have a favorite animal. Maybe it's a powerful apex predator like the tiger or a cute and cuddly panda. And those are great, but have you considered something a little more unconventional? Could I perhaps interest you in the Greenland shark, which can live for nearly 400 years, or maybe the jewel wasp who performs brain surgery on cockroaches to control their minds? On Just The Zoo of Us, we review animals by giving them ratings out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics.

Listen with friends and family of all ages to find your new favorite animal with just the two of us on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts. I'm Jordan Krushiel, the host of Feeling See, where we talk about the movie characters that make us feel see. And I'm the show's producer, Urissa. Jordan even reviewed so many directors, actors, writers, film critics, and I like to play this little game where I take a sip of coffee. Every time someone says, that's such a great question. That's such a fabulous question, or they tell you how smart you are. I think that you are rather brilliant. And of course, the big one is when they cry unexpectedly.

When they cry unexpectedly, yes, yes. Jordan, I don't want to cry in your podcast. I want to be an expecting cry. I mean, it makes me kind of want to cry. Feeling seen comes out every Thursday on MaximumFun.org. Listen already. What are you waiting for? Jordan, that's such a great question. So he has all this knowledge. What's he doing with this hit? He publishes this thesis, this dissertation. By the way, he was also the first black American to receive a doctoral degree from Colombia. So he does this and it's groundbreaking. It's very exciting what he has published. And it drew the attention of a Dr. John Scutter who had also been studying methods of preservation

and the concept of like, how can we better bank blood so that we don't, so that we can have a supply of it in a hospital for whoever comes in, a trauma or, you know, whatever injuries or what if we have a mass casualty event, whatever it is. Like, how can we supply people blood better? What can we do? And there was a ton of interest in this at this moment in history because the year is 1940. War, it, war drums are sounding across the planet.

Yeah, war. Our fighting men and women are getting up to do war. Yeah, over there, over there. Over there. So it is, this is prior to the US entering the war, but obviously we were interested keeping tabs on things. We'd love some blood. Had like a side we were on, you might say, not so much so that we had entered the war, but definitely had one side we were sort of, you know, ready to support. And so it's 1940, and the idea of having plentiful bloodstores for transfusions is very appealing to us,

depending on what the future would indeed bring, and to the people of Great Britain, who very much needed blood banking at this time. Our former overlords, you mean? Well, I mean, like, we're in, it's 1940. I'm not gonna let go of the garage. A lot of people are just gonna sail on pass and keep on drinking tea or whatever we're here, but I won't let it go. I would hope by even 1940 people were kind of over that.

No, never. No, still not. I'm never gonna let it go. So, Scutter reached out to Drew and said, hey, I would love if we could develop a program for banking blood, and we can ship it to Great Britain. We can ship it to the UK. Wouldn't that be great?

Like, the US can do it. You're the genius who came up with all of us. Let's get together. Let's make it happen. So Dr. Drew spearheaded what would be called the Blood for Britain program. That's fun. Yeah, and-

Love the illiteration for sure. Yeah, and basically, and that's exactly what he was doing. He was collecting, processing, testing, making sure it wasn't contaminated, you know, safe collection and storage of blood from initially like New York hospitals. So they were taking blood from kind New Yorkers who were willing to donate and have it preserved and shipped overseas to support the British military. He collected

over 14,500 pints of blood with this process, donated a ton of blood to the British military. And he also developed during this, the concept of like, well, what if we could take, instead of having to go to a hospital to donate blood? What if we could find a way to do it out in communities or to set up shop at other medical facilities

where they don't necessarily do this? So he developed the concept of what would be called a blood mobile, or a blood bus. Blood bus. Blood mobile, blood bus. And you would send this blood bus out to wherever, and it had like a refrigeration unit and everything. So you could go, have people come in, donate blood, you store their blood, and you can get it back

to the hospital or wherever you're, you know, you need a bigger facility. But like, he developed all this, all this sort of science so that we could increase our supply. And this was really like the first blood-banking effort. Dr. Charles Drew came up with all these ideas, strategize, not just like the science behind it, but the logistics. How will we do this? He was the one who figured it all out. And like I said, this was before the US entered World War II. Well, once we did enter the war.

Boilers? You think people don't know? Yeah. But once we did enter the war, it became all the more apparent why we need drew skills, why we needed, you know, to take those same techniques that he was using to bank blood, ship it overseas, we need to start doing to support the US military at this point as well. That's when we're going, Brent, we're like, listen, can we have some of that blood back?

Do you have any of it? I know we got all like, will and daily start throwing blood. Blood around around cuz we got a little cocky, but we would actually like some of that back That's a that's a New York blood and Not UK blood, so give it a toss. No, we didn't do that We Dr. Drew was named director of the first American Red Cross blood bank, the very first effort of this in February of 1941. And basically, his job at this point is everything you did for blood for Britain, we want to do it here. We want to create a second blood, his second blood bank. And this would be specifically to supply the US military personnel, especially like the Army in Navy is where this was focused.

So unfortunately, as he began this part of his career, it would be cut short by racism. So he began to collect blood explicitly, again, using a lot of the same like science and logistics, all these techniques that he had developed that were his, like, he had done all this for members of the US Army and Navy. And the military came to him. The Army and Navy and said, this is great except we don't want blood from any black Americans, please. And obviously, this is ridiculous. It's besides being racist and ignorant. It's devoid of science. Like there's no reason to limit blood donation by race. There's no scientific basis for that idea.

And he pointed all that out and was very upset about it. And they were like, okay, well, listen, fine, fine. We get your point. How about instead we just sort of store separately, maybe like segregate, you could say, the blood supply from black donors and white donors so that they would only use the blood supply from white donors, right?

And at this point, because again, this is racist and unscientific and unnecessary and dangerous, because it's a war effort. You need all the blood you can get from any kind willing donor. At that point, Dr. Charles Drew said, you know what, I'm actually done. And so he resigned his post in 1942 in protest of the racist policies from the US military. I know. It's a, it's a complete shame. Now the, the, the work he had done, the methods he had spearheaded, his dissertation, all of his research, all of his science, people were still benefiting from, you know, all of that good that he had done and put out into the world was still there.

I mean, the first blood banks, he created these first logistics and methods. He was the one who came up with this, who problem solved all of this, and provided who knows, at the end of the day, stemming from all this research and stuff, how many people's lives were saved from these methods. I mean, it would be impossible to quantify the number of people who benefited from this.

He did continue his medical career for a while at Howard and Friedman's Hospital. He was a professor. He was a surgeon. He was honored in his lifetime. It's always nice because I feel like a lot of these famous figures from medical history are not recognized until after they... That's all history. A lot of these famous figures for medical history are not recognized. A lot of history. That's true.

But the NAACP gave him an award in 1944 for his just outstanding efforts and achievements that changed mankind essentially. And to this day, there are a number of medical facilities, schools, he was on a stamp in 1981. He has been honored since then for his contributions to medical science and for being the father of blood banking. I know you always give me a hard time when I mention the end of someone's life on this show, but I think that it is relevant because the first time I heard about Dr. Charles Drew was on an episode of MASH, and they talk about him, and they actually repeat a myth that I did not know was a myth for many, many years after watching that episode. So if you've seen that episode of MASH, what I'm about to tell you is that Hock I lied to

you, I'm sorry. But he died in a car accident. Since about the year 1939, he would go to an annual free clinic that was held in Tuskegee and volunteer his medical services, his surgical services during this free clinic. And so he did the same and was headed back, this was 1950, and was headed back from this the next morning, and unfortunately died in a fatal car accident on his way home. There is a story, and if you've seen the mash episode, you've heard it, that he was taken to a hospital and desperately needed a blood transfusion and was denied it because he was black.

This is actually not true. But that was the myth that I had heard on mash because he was black. This is actually not true, but that was the myth that I had heard on mash and thought was true. Well, this is shocking. Sydney's from an acro- popular podcaster in Canada for others, and they'll get says, racism ameth.

I don't believe this, Sydney. Why would you even say that with that in there? Don't give a sound bite. No. No. Does this retain your instincts or racism? a sound bite. No No Racism is not no, I just this yes, that was not that was not I mean it is he was I mean worse Probably happened that day. Yeah, yeah, no, I just mean that that I had heard that story on mash

And I thought it was true for the longest time But it's still it's still sad and tragic, because his life was cut short, and he obviously had done so much. And such a short time. He was just cut short by racism, and his life was cut short by car accidents. It's a tragedy.

But a wonderful contribution nonetheless. Yes, yeah, I mean, the blood banking, as we know it, it came from him. He is the one who spearheaded that and came up with that science. And it is especially relevant, again, to celebrate Dr. Charles Drew as an outstanding black American physician, surgeon, scientist, doctor who made these great contributions. But also because, as I said, right now, we are in dire need of blood donations. If you can, this is a great time to consider donating blood.

I would especially raise that charged my fellow notaries. We are as you know held to a higher standard and this is your chance to step up and do the right thing for all notaries. Yeah. and do the right thing for all notaries. Yeah, and I can tell you, it's very real and it's being felt. I have in medical facilities where I've worked in recent weeks, we have had variously no blood product in the hospital at various times.

It's also not that bad for the record. I shouldn't say no blood, I mean of specific blood products we needed. I'm a bit of a wimp and it's really, like it didn't hurt that bad, it didn't take that long, it didn't weigh around that long, did give free snacks the end. That's not that. I was gonna say do you get snacks? Oh, I got snacks.

Yeah, they'll let you have another one if you ask. If you're like, if you want a second one, you can totally get another one. And they got juice too. Like, Simon, they have brownie brittle, like, and chips, like, it was pretty good. I'm fruit and stuff. And I wanted to just as a kind of brief addendum. Make sure of this next. A lot of people have asked about, or a lot of people still continue to bring up the fact

that we at this point still have limitations on who can donate blood based on sexual behavior. Yes. So specifically the guidelines, and these come from the FDA. I thought they were red cross, but they are red cross with their VIA FDA recommendation. So any blood collection facility in the US would be subject to these same guidelines.

If you are a man who has had sex with another man within the last three months, you are not allowed to donate blood. This is vastly different from even just a couple of years ago in response to the pandemic. That has changed through the years from you can never donate blood to, if you've had sex with another man within the last year, you can't donate blood to six months to now three months in response to an increased need, which I think a lot of people have pointed out is lousy. We didn't let you donate blood, but now we will because we really need it and because we knew it was safe and we knew that this was on this policy at this point was unnecessary because we have such great methods of testing blood product for things like HIV or hepatitis or whatever

the concern is. Specifically what this stems from is the beginnings of HIV and the AIDS epidemic. That is where all of this comes from. There is a study going on currently that hopefully will change this completely. It's called the Advanced Study, and there are sites all over the country where they are trying to see if this is, well, what many expect is that this is not necessary. That certainly it's always important to ask people who are donating blood screening questions to assess their risk for something like HIV, but that the time frame in which they may have had sex with a member of the same sex is not the best question to ask is not the best data point somewhat, you know, so it speaks to collect. So hopefully we should have results from the study later this year,

this will change that because it's always, you's always been discriminatory in a lot of ways it is. And it's not the best science, it's not the best way to screen donors. And we can do better. And so hopefully from this study we'll see a change in that this year. I hope so. Well, thank you, Sydney, for that. And thanks, Dr. Drew, for that incredible conversation. Dr. Charles Drew. Dr. Charles Drew. Well, all Dr. Drew's are pretty worthy of celebration. No, I wouldn't. Okay, said, before

we actually let past us close the show with some announcements that I'm sure are no longer timely, what has changed since this episode came out? So Justin, people have been calling for a long time for an update to the sort of protocol we have in place to screen people who want to donate blood. For, and when I say people have been calling for an update, I mean, both lay people within the blood donation community, people who are constant.

There are people who are just good reliable donors, people in the scientific community, the medical community, as well as people within the LGBTQ plus community because the guidelines were very targeted at eliminating not necessarily for the purpose of eliminating men who have sex with men from the donor pool. But that was really how they screen people. If you were a man who has sex with men and you had had sex within the last three months, you could not donate blood period.

And so that would, the result of that is that aside from people who were engaged in safe sexual practices, and aside from the fact that it was specifically aimed at men who have sex with men, even to people who were in a long-term monogamous relationship and wanted to donate blood, if they were both men, would have to not have sex for three months with each other in order to donate blood, which you can see how discriminatory, a guideline like this would be. So they have been doing studies in the advanced study, I believe we've referenced in past episodes, not necessarily when you just listen to,

but we've referenced that in other episodes. Looking to see, is there a better way where we can screen our blood donation pool so that we do not transmit HIV unintentionally, of course. But we allow everyone who would like to donate blood and can safely do so to enter into that donor base and that we don't base our guidelines strictly on your sexual orientation because we can see why that would be discriminatory. So a lot of time and research and thought

and looking at how other countries screen their donor pool went into these new updated guidelines that were just released by the FDA May 11th, I believe. So these are brand new. So now what they're going to do is an individual risk-based assessment questionnaire that every donor will receive. So this is regardless of your gender, of your sex, of your sexual orientation, of who you have had sex with in the past. Everyone will receive the same questionnaire to screen them for their risk.

If you've never donated before, which I mean I do all the time. So if you've never donated before, there's like a fairly lengthy questionnaire that has a lot of these things that start to feel like completely random, like, have you been, were you in like this part of the world at this certain time? So these like questionnaires are already happening for a lot of blood donors.

And previously, it would include on there, are you a man who has sex with men? Very specifically that. Instead, what they're going to focus on now are behaviors, not what your sexual orientation is, but behaviors that anyone may have engaged in that we know put you at higher risk for contracting HIV.

And these timeframes, by the way, you're going to hear three months a lot. The reason is because we know that within three months, the best tests we have to detect HIV are the best three months after that sexual contact or whatever contact we may have transmitted HIV. Does that make sense? That's the window where you could have contracted HIV and a test would not necessarily pick it up. It's usually in practice smaller than that, but three months is what we can guarantee.

So that's where that comes from. So anyway, it will continue to basically people who will be asked to defer blood donation, meaning because of your risk, we're asking you not to donate. We'll still include people who have had a positive test for HIV or people who are on medications for HIV because even though we know that taking medications for HIV can make your viral load undetectable, which means you can't transmit it through sex, it's a much larger volume of blood, and we don't have data that says we couldn't then take blood from you and give it to another person and not give them HIV. There's a difference between that and sexual contact.

Same thing with people who have taken HIV preventive medicines. If you are on pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, which we've talked about before, or if you've had an exposure that you worry about for HIV and you had to take post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV, which we've talked about before, or if you've had an exposure that you worry about for HIV and you had to take post-exposure prophylaxis. Within the last three months, those people will be asked to defer until after that time period. Same thing for a history of people who take injection medicines to prevent HIV. That's the timeframe for that is two years, actually. The sex-based questionnaires is the real switch. Good one.

Remember from Austin Dowers? Yeah, no, I got to. If you have a history in the past three months of sex with more than one partner, then at that point, they're going to ask you if follow-up question, have you had anal sex in the past three months? And it's the same thing if you've had multiple partners within the last three months. Again, they will ask you a question about anal sex in the past three months. And it's the same thing if you've had multiple partners within the last three months, again, they will ask you a question about anal sex. And if you meet that criteria, they will ask you to defer for three months. And this is

for everyone. So they're not asking specifically about your sexual orientation. They're just asking about sexual practices. This will be the same for a history in the past three months of exchanging sex for money or drugs or some other form of payment or a history in the past three months of Injection drug use non prescription injection drug use. I should say Similarly to if you've had Some sort of transfusion in the last three months or there's actually specific guidelines for a tattoo ear or body piercing in the last three months. Now, I will say that the FDA says if these were at licensed regulated facilities where we know that they're using single-use needles, you know, appropriately cleaned equipment and all that sort

of thing, that doesn't necessarily exclude you. So it would depend on sort of the situation in which you received a tattoo or piercing. Because I think for a lot of us, we think, well, I mean, most of us these days, I think, have not most, but a lot of us have. So anyway, what you see from this is one, we're not specifically asking you to tell us before you donate blood, are you gay? Which is very, very much what they were asking before or or bisexual. Now they're asking about sexual practices. They're shortening that window and it reintroduces there may be people out there listening who because of any of these other guidelines have been what you thought

was permanently excluded from the blood donation pool. That's no longer true. You can be reevaluated. Now, there are some hard exclusion criteria. We talked about that. If you are a person who has had a positive test for HIV, that we don't reevaluate then, those still remain that we ask that you not donate blood, but there are a lot of people who are gonna be able to donate blood now.

And in this episode you just listened to, I said we are in a situation where we desperately donate blood now. And in this episode you just listen to, I said, we are in a situation where we desperately need blood donors. That is something that hasn't changed. We are still in a situation where we very much need people who are eligible, who are capable to donate blood. So if in the past, especially members of the LGBTQ plus community, if you've been excluded from donating blood related to that, and you would like to, I would check out these guidelines are freely available. I found the PDF online. They've been widely published by the FDA. You can check it yourself. And then if you think you'd be eligible, please reconsider donating blood. This is a better

way to do it. It's a less discriminatory way to do it. And it's a way where we can safely expand the donor pool to more willing participants, which is good for everybody. If you are able to, and you never have, it's really not a big lift, you sign onto the Red Cross website. They'll have a huge list. They got an app too. Huge list of places where you can go donate. You schedule your appointment. huge list of places where you can go donate. You make your schedule your appointment. There's probably one near you and not too far away. Time wise, just go to redcross.org. I'm pretty sure, go to redcross.org and you can find

a bunch of different opportunities. It's not hard. I know some people have stuff with needles and obviously, you know, I'm not talking to you, but if you're able to, it's really like an hour of it out of your day that you just, you could feel really good about and do some good. So. And if you're interested at FDA.gov, you can look up the entire, it's a 19 page document with all the references. If you're the sort of person who wants to read that

ahead of time, which I am, so where I like, check it out. All right. Let's wrap up the episode. Thank you to you so much for listening. We very much appreciate it. Thanks to taxpayers for the use of their song, Medicines as the intro and outro of our program. Oh, McElroyMarch.com. You can, for the rest of February, just a few more days to get the book store trouble pin, but it's a reference to book stores. It's very clever. Our designer said I'm a kid, I don't want a full job with that one.

And a great quote from Sydney, I'm not ashamed of my clown husband. That is now a bumper sticker that you can buy that supports the Honeyton children's museum. So please get some of those. That's designed by Jacob Bailey. So thank you, Jacob. That's going to do it for us. What's the thing you got to know? Nope, so thank you, Jacob. That's gonna do it for us. Unless there's anything you got to. Nope, that'll do it.

That's gonna do it until next time. My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head! Alright! Maximumfun.org Comedy and Culture Artist Oat? Audience Supported