Media’s approach makes more bad blood
“A man who has had sex with another man within the last five years, whether oral or anal sex, with or without a condom or other form of protection, is not permitted to donate blood and must please not do so,” said Dr Robert Crookes last Thursday.
And so it began – a week where the words “gay” and “blood” were splashed over every bill from Aberdeen to Zeerust. The issue couldn't have come at a better time for news media suffering from a slow news month. What the issue was, however, is another matter.
News media have focused largely on the fall-out between the SANBS and the gay community and published some pretty sensational headlines from Saturday Star's “ Gays launch blood war” to News24's “ It's a blood bath”. (The Sunday Times interestingly, and commendably, chose to completely ignore the issue in its print editions last weekend.)
Media trainer and respected journalist Gwen Ansell took on the Saturday Star's questionable journalism with some incisive analysis. Her conclusion:
“As a media trainer, I despair. Particularly when another paper in the same group, the Sunday Independent, managed a far more balanced account the following day, so the resources on which to do so were clearly out there. And as a journalist, my shoulders stoop under a bit more of the shared responsibility my profession will bear the next time homophobia claims a victim.
A spectre is certainly haunting South Africa . It's the spectre of shoddy journalism.”
The issue is risk of course, and the data is a bit thin on men who have sex with men at this stage. In fact, references to 1983 studies – when the HIV profile was certainly a lot different – are still being used by the SANBS.
The second Nelson Mandela/HSRC study released late last year did not assess the risk of men who have sex with men, but found the highest HIV prevalence is among females aged 25-29 at 33.3%. Does the SANBS prevent young women from donating blood? (No.)
Of course, it is slightly more complex than this. But the point made by a (thankfully sane) caller on the After Eight Debate on SAFM yesterday (Jan 19) is worth repeating here: the way in which the SANBS assesses risk should move away from this antiquated notion of risk “groups” and rather to ask questions that really get to the bottom of risky “behaviour”.
In other words, we need to account for a gay man who exclusively engages in oral sex (super low risk) and a young woman who engages in regular unprotected anal sex (the undisputed heavy-weight champion of risky sex) with her boyfriend.
Although the SANBS uses the latest testing technology, it admits that even this doesn't always detect the HI virus during the window period. So any person, black, white, straight, gay, young or old, who engages in unsafe sexual intercourse could have undetectable HIV in his or her bloodstream at the time of donation. The SANBS tries to mitigate this by preventing certain “high-risk” groups from donating blood at all.
One of these high-risk groups is gay men, who aren't allowed to donate blood in many countries around the world. But the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Southern Africa is so very different to other parts of the world that following international best practice is disingenuous.
Perhaps HIV/AIDS is still perceived as a “gay” disease in other countries, but in South Africa we all know that it is everybody's disease, particularly if you are young and female.
There is no easy answer to this issue, but surely media coverage must move away from old, tired stereotypes and towards cold, hard facts.
Bring on contemporary research to show gay men are more likely to be HIV-positive than young black females, living in urban informal settlements in KwaZulu-Natal , and then we can start talking about justified discrimination.
In the coming weeks, the SANBS promises to address some of the issues raised by gay activists. But the media-induced stigma that gay people want to foist their infected blood on vulnerable, innocent people will haunt our democracy for years to come. – Lunga Madlala & Richard Frank