Warning Covers Sex Acts in Last 8 Years : Blood Is Suspect After Only One Gay Contact, FDA Says

In revised guidelines aimed at keeping the AIDS virus out of the nation’s blood supply, federal health officials recommended Thursday that any man who has had sex with another man even once in the last eight years refrain from donating blood.

The national Centers for Disease Control for some time has considered homosexual or bisexual men with multiple sexual partners to be at increased risk for acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

But the latest recommendation from the Food and Drug Administration, published by the Atlanta-based CDC, applies even to men “who may have had only a single contact, and who do not consider themselves homosexual or bisexual.”

The FDA stopped short of saying that any man who has ever had homosexual relations is at increased risk for AIDS. “But we would certainly consider them able to be carriers,” said Susan Cruzan, a spokeswoman for the FDA.

AIDS is an affliction in which the body’s immune system becomes unable to resist disease.

It is most likely to strike homosexuals, abusers of injectable drugs and hemophiliacs. It apparently can be spread by sexual contact, contaminated needles and blood transfusions, but not by casual contact.

As of Sept. 2, the CDC said, it has received reports of 12,932 AIDS cases in the United States and 6,481 deaths from the affliction.

A spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration said that health researchers checked stored frozen blood and blood supplies of high-risk groups and determined that no AIDS antibodies were present before 1977.