It's almost as if people who are donating this frequently should be properly screened and truly compensated for the value they are providing...
* Blood Donor Screening || http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/BloodBloodProducts...
> FDA has progressively strengthened the overlapping safeguards that protect patients from unsuitable blood and blood products. Blood donors are asked specific questions about risk factors that could affect the safety of the donation and are deferred from donation if risk factors are acknowledged. FDA also requires blood centers to maintain lists of unsuitable donors to prevent further donations from these individuals. After donation, the blood is tested for several infectious agents. All tests must be negative before the blood is suitable for transfusion. In addition to these safeguards, FDA has significantly increased its oversight of the blood industry. The agency inspects all blood facilities at least every two years, and "problem" facilities are inspected more often. Blood establishments are now held to quality standards comparable to those expected of pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Parent's argument doesn't seem to be irrelevant, otherwise, if the screenings were totally reliable why would we bother asking for risky behaviours ?
Lying is one of the arguments against paid blood donations in France, the other being that poor people may be incentivized to put their health at risk by donating to often (donations are anonymous). The WHO seems to advocate for unpaid donations :
> An adequate and reliable supply of safe blood can be assured by a stable base of regular, voluntary, unpaid blood donors. These donors are also the safest group of donors as the prevalence of bloodborne infections is lowest among this group. World Health Assembly resolution WHA63.12 urges all Member States to develop national blood systems based on voluntary unpaid donations and to work towards the goal of self-sufficiency.[1]
> An adequate and reliable supply of safe blood can be assured by a stable base of regular, voluntary, unpaid blood donors.
An adequate and reliable supply of plasma cannot be assured by a stable base of unpaid plasma donors - countries that pay for donations run a surplus and end up supplying it to countries that don't, because the latter don't produce enough.
> if the screenings were totally reliable why would we bother asking for risky behaviours ?
Because it saves time (and money) to be able to rule out people who are ineligible for blood donation before they ever get their blood drawn. You might think, "how could a person who has had Hepatitis A not know that they are ineligible to give blood?", but the answer is that this happens all the time.
Screening questions are there as a cost-saving measure; they're not intended to catch anything that blood testing wouldn't, and they're already arguably overly conservative in the screening stage as it is.
> What about the window between an infection by the HIV and the production of antibodies ? >
(A) For plasma, you don't test for antibodies - you test for viral load.
(B) The window is incredibly short. The chance of someone donating plasma within a few days of being infected with HIV and having a viral load high enough to transmit HIV but also not test positive is minuscule. At that point, there are far bigger risks to worry about, like the many things that you can't test for (and which the patient may not know they have). Risk management isn't about eliminating risk; it's about systematically and contextually evaluating the appropriate levels of risk.
This is even more rigorous than what we do for whole blood donation, in which blood samples are pooled and tested as a batch. Ironically, the reason we're able to do this is that we make a larger profit off of plasma donations, whereas we don't for whole blood, and have to use the cheaper testing methods for that.
Meanwhile, men can't donate if they've had sexual contact with men in the past 12 months. http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requ...