AIDS Screening Has Been in Force 2 Years, Red Cross Says : Dannemeyer Urges Ban on Gay Blood Donors

Twelve days after researchers reported that a new test apparently has succeeded in screening AIDS-tainted blood from the nation’s blood supply, an Orange County congressman said Monday that he has asked for a national ban on blood donations by homosexuals.

Rep. William E. Dannemeyer (R-Fullerton) said he has asked Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler to issue a directive to screen all blood donors for homosexuality in order to “protect the nation’s blood supply.”

Dannemeyer said he cited instances where known intravenous drug abusers were requested to refrain from donating blood, but that no such prohibition was placed on homosexuals.

But Gerry Sohle, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles and Orange County region of the American Red Cross, said blood centers across the United States have been screening donations from sexually active gay men and others at higher risk of contracting AIDS since at least 1983, when the first transfusion-related AIDS cases were appearing.

Sohle said that donors are asked in a questionnaire and in a follow-up interview with a registered nurse whether they are homosexual. If they answer “yes,” and still insist on donating blood, donations by male homosexuals are set aside solely for research use. (Lesbians are considered unlikely to be at risk of contracting or spreading AIDS, and as such, their blood donations are accepted and tested for AIDS virus antibodies.)

Sohle said the American Assn. of Blood Banks in Arlington, Va., and the Council of Community Blood Centers based in Falls Church, Va., have followed the policy, too.

Moreover, the test for antibodies to the HTLV-III virus believed to cause Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome is about 99.8% effective, according to U.S. and European researchers who presented data at a July 31 conference in Bethesda, Md.

Transfusion-associated cases of AIDS, an often fatal disease that attacks the body’s immune system, account for about 2% of the 12,256 AIDS cases reported to the federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta through Aug. 5.

According to Dr. James W. Curran, who heads the AIDS investigative team for the CDC, the blood-screening test employed since mid-March has “pretty much solved the transfusion-associated AIDS cases.”

Gay groups across the country also have been encouraging individuals in high-risk groups to abstain from blood donations for 2 1/2 years, according to Werner Kuhn, the new executive director of the Orange County Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center in Garden Grove.

“It sounds to me like Monday-morning quarterbacking,” Kuhn said of Dannemeyer’s proposal, adding:

“It certainly doesn’t show that the congressman has an enlightened or informed attitude. Whether as a result of bad advice from his advisers, he really isn’t aware of the terrific steps that have been taken to protect the blood supply, all of which has occurred with the full cooperation of the gay community in Orange County and elsewhere.”

But Dannemeyer disputed that, citing information provided by internist Dr. William M. Coburn of Westlake, Calif., and Paul Cameron, who heads the Institute for the Scientific Investigation of Sexuality in Lincoln, Neb.

Cameron has waged a nationwide campaign to generate legislative action targeting homosexuals as carriers of AIDS and potential child molesters, according to Miguel Gomez, a representative of the Gay Rights National Lobby in Washington.

Coburn said the blood-screening practice followed by the Red Cross “is not mandatory public policy. I am quite certain there are several (blood donation centers) that are not using this technique” of screening homosexuals.