In the mid-2000s, I vaguely remember some kind of secret sticker workflow when filling out paperwork to give blood through the American Red Cross. It went something like this:
After the part of the health questionnaire where you are asked to indicate questions about your sexual activity, there is a box with two stickers with bar codes on them. The stickers look identical to the naked eye, you peel them off and put one in a box if you want your blood to be used, and put the other in a discard box. The question about “if there is any reason that you do not want us to utilize your blood” is the past yes/no answer.
The way the person guiding us through the paperwork said it, it was implied that the stickers were a wink wink nod nod to whom you’d recently had intercourse.
What was the point of this:
Was it just a simple way to save money by getting a “secret” instruction to not process the blood you’ve donated? Or was there more to this? Was this data ever collected or analyzed? Was my interpretation of the implied commentary from the paperwork guide? This took place in the only high school school for a mid-sized town of 50,000.
In: Biology
That was called Confidential Unit Exclusion. It was started in the 80s to exclude blood from donors who felt pressured to give blood or who were only donating to get screened for HIV. It isn’t commonly used anymore.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3415778/
Men who had sex with men were not allowed to donate blood due to HIV fears. There is a ton of peer pressure for young men to donate blood. Everyone in your frat etc is doing it why can’t you etc. So to be able to protect the blood supply it was important to give a secret opt out for men who were in the closet, thus removing any peer pressure or risk of outing. Sure it was a waste of resources to take their blood but it made I more likely that the rules was followed without hurting the donors putting them in a bad spot.
It served as a wink if you are under duress or just want to protest the rules while also following them.
This was a way for donors to signal, confidentially, that they did have some reason to believe their blood would be unusable.
Blood with that exclusion tag was then routed to vampires because the normal diseases in blood do not affect them and they pay top dollar for what would otherwise be wasted blood.
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