Should mongers donate blood?

[Sportsman]

On rare occasions, I feel I should do something decent. Donating blood to American Red Cross is an easy way for me to help others, and my blood type is often in short supply. But in the screening questionnaire it asks "Have you had sexual contact with any prostitute within the last 12 months?" I assume if I answer truthfully I would not qualify to donate. I get my blood work regularly during routine physical, so I know I am somewhat in good health. Since donated blood gets screened before it is placed in supply anyway, my question is should I lie in the screening questionnaire so I can donate? Or is the real decent thing to do is not to donate at all?

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

Sportsman

[Stormy]

Your intentions are good, but you should not lie about this. Contact with prostitutes does put one at risk, however cautious one may be and there is no reason to pass that risk on to anyone else, however slight.

[Dickhead]

Here in Argentina, if you have an operation at the public hospital and need X pints of blood, they ask you to get X friends to donate for you, or else they charge you (or maybe just threaten to) So back in '04 I had a friend have an operation and she asked me to donate. I had to go to Hospital Durand at 7 AM. They asked me a bunch of questions, including "Have you had sex with a prostitute in the last 12 months?" to which I answered "Yes." They took my blood. I'm sure they screened it.

Later, like two months later, I got a letter from the hospital: "You need to come in; we found some irregularities in your blood." Oh shit I've got AIDS. I'm going to die. I go in there and I get some shit about irregular antogens or some shit and I might have a liver disease or not and they need to take a second sample and they do and I never heard back. But it did make me go get an AIDS test, which was negative. Of course that was about 125 hookers ago.

Don't lie. If they don't want the blood so be it.

[Hunt99]

Mongers should only donate money to the blood bank. A lot of the stuff you can pick up from the odd sexual contact doesn't always show up for months, if at all.

That said, female-to-male transmission of AIDS is very rare, and this risk is reduced to an almost-infinitesimal chance by using rubbers. Of course, as we know, not all mongers or hookers use rubbers regularly.