In case you haven't seen it, mpk has a response[1] which brings up a point I've never seen made before:
> All blood gets tested and though false negatives are still possible, most infections are statistically close enough to 100% detectable after 6 months.
This kind makes irrelevant all the outrage over them accepting blood from donors who have had wildly unsafe sex over 12 months ago. At this point it's only a matter of risk management surrounding the possibility of recent infection. You may say that in that case, it shouldn't matter if you had a same-gender sexual encounter 30 years ago, but this really just boils down to statistics, and having a same-gender sexual encounter puts you in an entirely different statistical category than people who restrict themselves to strictly heterosexual encounters.
> All blood gets tested and though false negatives are still possible, most infections are statistically close enough to 100% detectable after 6 months.
This kind makes irrelevant all the outrage over them accepting blood from donors who have had wildly unsafe sex over 12 months ago. At this point it's only a matter of risk management surrounding the possibility of recent infection. You may say that in that case, it shouldn't matter if you had a same-gender sexual encounter 30 years ago, but this really just boils down to statistics, and having a same-gender sexual encounter puts you in an entirely different statistical category than people who restrict themselves to strictly heterosexual encounters.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3240432