Stanford Blood Donation Center implements updated FDA guidelines for donor eligibility

The Stanford Blood Donation Center implemented recommendations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday, Oct. 19, to expand blood donation eligibility.

The FDA announced the changes to its blood donation eligibility guidelines in May, which now recommend asking donors about individual risk factors that may cause them to be more prone to contracting infections like HIV, which would make them ineligible for donation. LGBTQ+ activists have previously criticized the FDA’s blood donation policy for unnecessarily banning men who have sex with men from donating blood unless they had been abstinent for three months.

They argued that men who have sex with men are not the only population at risk for contracting HIV but are the only population entirely banned from donating blood. Men who have sex with men were completely banned from donating blood until 2015, when the FDA revised its guidelines to allow them to donate blood only if they had been abstinent for a year, and then eventually changed that requirement to three months.

Jenn Bennett, the marketing and communications director for the Stanford Blood Center, said the FDA gave blood donation centers a six month deadline to implement its new guidelines, and the Stanford Blood Center has since been “fast-tracking” implementation of the new questionnaire.

“This is because implementation in a highly regulated industry can take that long, between technology system upgrades, changes to processes and formal standard operating procedures, staff training, donor requalification procedures, and communications,” Bennett told this news publication.

Bennett said larger blood centers with more resources were able to implement the changes faster than independent blood donation centers like Stanford’s. The Red Cross announced it was implementing the new FDA guidelines in August.

“This historic change in approach to donor eligibility is significant progress,” Suchi Pandey, Chief Medical Officer for Stanford Blood Center, said in a release. “By asking all potential donors the same questions about their sexual behavior, this change reflects the fact that infectious diseases like HIV can be contracted by anyone, regardless of their gender or sexual orientation.”