This letter is in response to Joel Taylor’s April 16 letter “FDA regulations discriminate gays.” I don’t know too many people who support saving a life from one threatening disease, just to be infected with another. If you search Google for HIV, you will find Japan reporting their findings of a form of HIV that is now not responding to anti-AIDS drugs.

If you visit hivinsite.ucsf.edu, you will get all medical information about HIV and AIDS and you can read the quote:

“There are about 150 million chronic hepatitis C (HCV) carriers throughout the world with an estimated global prevalence of three percent (range 0.1-five percent). (1) In the United States nearly two percent of the population is infected with hepatitis C virus (HCV).” … “Coinfection with HCV in HIV-infected individuals is common, presumably due to the shared route of transmission of these viruses.”

I support the Food and Drug Administration regulations because my 34-year-old cousin from Madison, Wis., was winning the battle against cancer. With every chemo treatment, he lost his white blood cells and was given plasma platelets to replenish and help build his immune system back up.

That was, until he received platelets tainted with HCV. Cancer didn’t kill him, but the bad blood someone donated did.

Since then, Blood Centers now screen for HCV, but HIV lies dormant for an unknown length of time. Dormant HIV won’t show up on any of today’s advance testing screening. You could be a carrier and not even know it. Would you want to pass on that risk to some one in need?

I, too, would like to see more African-Americans be organ donors, but by making comments like, “Excluding gay men of color from the process is only another way that people of color are shut out” is classifying the majority of men of color as being gay. That is an unfair, biased statement.

Also remember, no mater what color we are, we all have the same types of blood. So those overly abundant Caucasian donors are saving many lives, including homosexuals, who are fighting HIV, by donating.

Nancy Suby-Bohn

Senior

Civil Engineering