The FDA Wouldn't Let This 24-Year-Old Give Blood — So He Donated A Kidney Instead

By Nico Lang


The day right after Barton Lynch lost a major internal organ, he was already up and walking around.


On May 29, the 24-year-old went in for a non-directed kidney donation. In most kidney transplants, the donor goes in with a recipient in mind, perhaps a sick friend or relative experiencing kidney failure. A non-directed donor, although, essentially throws their kidney on the open market for anyone who needs it. But much less normal, non-directed kidney donations can be exceedingly impactful, with firms like Johns Hopkins reporting that they can potentially save dozens of lives.


“For example, in the event you needed to get a kidney, I wanted to give mine to you, and also you and I are not a match, I can give my kidney to someone else who might be in the same situation, nevertheless their person is a match for you,” Barton, who works as a researcher for a consulting firm in Washington, D.C., Explained to MTV News over the phone. “It opens up these long chains of people for donation.”


Lynch describes the process as surprisingly easy. First, he and his doctor decided surgery was the correct choice for him. On the day of his surgery, his parents picked him up at 5:30 in the morning to go to the hospital, he changed into his gown, they knocked him out, and he woke up with one fewer kidney.


While Lynch says he was inspired to get involved because he wanted to prepare a difference in someone else’s life, the mission was also a personalized one. While in his freshman year of college, his father was diagnosed with cancer. Due to the medications the elder Lynch, who'd routinely donated blood during Barton’s life, was taking for treatment, he was unable to continue his donations.


“My dad has routinely led by example on helping others, so I knew that I could be doing him delighted by carrying the blood donation torch much possible as soon as he might not,” Lynch recalls.


While Lynch donated while in college, he had no choice however to find another way to continue his promise immediately after he started dating both males and females two years back. Per a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) policy, all males who have sex with boys (MSMs) are banned from donating blood unless they refrain from same-sex intimacy for 12 months; Lynch is now in a relationship with another man.


Jay Franzone, a former spokesperson for the National Gay Blood Drive, made headlines in 2016 while he remained abstinent for a full year just to donate. However this policy is comparatively lenient in comparison to past policies; before it was rolled out in December 2015, gay and bisexual boys were banned for life.


According to Sean Cahill, director of health policy statistics at the Fenway Institute, the ideas are a remnant of HIV/AIDS panic in the 1980s, a time as soon as he says the medical community “didn't know a lot” about the virus or how it spread. Because of the lack of efficient screening, Cahill says thousands of people contracted HIV through blood transfusions “very unnecessarily and very tragically.”


“It’s something that policymakers remember and don't desire to repeat,” he tells MTV News.


Adopted two years right following the New York Times first announced on a “rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals,” the 1983 policy targeted “Haitians, hemophiliacs, homosexuals, and heroin addicts,” also referred to because the “4Hs.” The ideas were almost immediately met with controversy. The ban on donors from Haiti, which has among the highest rates of HIV/AIDS among Caribbean nations, was lifted in 1990 soon after up to 80,000 people marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in protest.


Although, the prohibition on MSM donors has effectively remained in place; critics have called the new 12-month deferral period a “de facto” ban and are urging the FDA to go further in its reconsiderations of the rule.


“It often takes a long time to reverse or change outdated policies,” Cahill says. “They’re no longer based on the most recent science.”


As of 2014, corporations like the American Association of Blood Banks, America’s Blood Centers, and the American Medical Association have called for the FDA to adopt the “risk-based assessment” test favored by Italy and Spain. As a substitute opposed to solely interrogating MSMs about their behavior, these countries ask all potential donors specific questions about their sexual histories sort in attempt to decide an individual’s likelihood of transmitting HIV/AIDS.


Under the risk-based assessment test, a straight man who has unprotected sex with dozens of sexual partners could be more likely than a gay man who is in a monogamous relationship to be resisted as a candidate for blood donation. Under the FDA’s current points, the opposite is true.


According to a 2016 report from Vice magazine, Italy has seen “no higher incidence of HIV transmissions as a result” of the points, which were adopted 2001.


case in point, those questions are similar to the ones Lynch says he was asked while in his application process to donate a kidney. He says his medical team only asked about his sexual orientation twice: whenever he registered to donate in November and then right after they scheduled his surgery. Lynch’s doctors did say, yet, that whomever eventually acquired his kidney could be informed that the donor is more likely to transmit HIV.


“My surgeon spoke to me about that,” Lynch remembers, “and how it was something she didn't agree with.”


According to Dr. Jennifer Verbesey, the surgeon who performed Lynch’s operation at Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., The chances that a patient will contract HIV from a MSM kidney donor is “infinitesimally” small; she estimates the odds as “one in several millions.”


“Our tests are exceedingly sensitive right now for picking up HIV,” Dr. Verbesey tells MTV News. The surgeon, who has operated at Georgetown for eight years, reports that current technology can detect the presence of the virus in the bloodstream within “five to seven days before donating.”


While the FDA is accountable for regulating the blood offer in the U.S., The standards for kidney donation are decided by another branch of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS): the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The company, which oversees the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), does not restrict gay and bisexual men from donating a kidney.


According to Anne Paschke, a media relations specialist with UNOS, HRSA has actually never banned gay and bisexual gentlemen from donating a kidney. However in spite of the fact that the federal business was traditional in 1982, it didn’t start sharing organs on the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) up until 1987.


“The only total rule out was that you can not donate in case you had HIV,” Paschke tells MTV News. “Nobody should rule themselves out, especially now.”


While Paschke wasn’t sure why HRSA is accountable for kidney donations while the FDA regulates the blood offer, the HHS department also oversees bone marrow and tissue donations. Gay and bisexual males were banned from application to the National Bone Marrow Registry until 2015, any time once they were allowed to donate for the opening time.


Be the Match, which manages donations via National Bone Marrow Registry, says that it hasn't seen an increase in HIV/AIDS transmissions in the tissue offer in the past four years. Soon following the new tips were reported, Mary Halet, the former director of community engagement for the registry company Be the Match, claimed that federal businesses determined that “patients were not placed at any added profound risk.”


“What we learned after awhile is that as donors donated having those risk factors, we noticed regularly that their infectious diseases were negative,” Halet told NBC News. “The risk of dying from leukemia or blood cancer is far greater than the potential risk of dying from infectious infection transmission.”


Even as other firms update their tips, the FDA has remained exceedingly resistant to adopting new policies on MSM donations. Just days before he donated a kidney, Lynch emailed a representative with the corporation to protest the current 12-month deferral window. A representative with its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Statistics (CBER) replied by claiming the FDA is “sensitive to the concerns of potential donors and other individuals affected by current blood safety policies.”


“The FDA's primary responsibility with regard to blood and blood products is to assure the safety of patients who receive these life-saving products,” its response read. “The FDA uses numerous layers of safeguards in its approach to ensuring blood safety, which include donor screening and deferral based on risk factors, blood testing for markers of disease, and inventory controls.”


Yet despite the FDA’s assertion that gay and bisexual males have a “62-fold increased risk for being HIV positive,” Dr. Verbesey agrees with Cahill that the tips on blood donations are “outdated.”


Just as protesters marched to end the discriminatory policies targeting Haitans nearly three decades ago, the fight to end stigma continues on. Immediately after gay and bisexual boys were unable to give blood to the survivors of the Pulse nightclub shooting, in which 49 people were gunned down at a gay bar in Orlando, Florida, 32 Congressional Democrats sent a letter to the FDA urging the corporation to reconsider its 12-month deferral period.


“The FDA’s deferral policy labeled several MSM males as ineligible to donate blood given the impractical standards these males are forced to meet,” the letter states. “Members of the community most affected by this tragedy noticed themselves ostracized from participating in the recovery.”


Yet last year, British artist Stuart Semple found a new way for MSMs to donate. Because they couldn’t give blood, gay staffers at the ad business Mother donated to a t-shirt as an alternative, which Semple called “Blood is Blood.”


“This shirt is printed with the blood of gay men,” it reads.


While activists continue to push for policies that mirror where science already is on the provide, Lynch hopes to raise awareness about other possibilities for gay and bisexual males in the U.S. Who aspire to get involved. He experienced no complications with his surgery and does not expect any long-term health impacts as a result of the donation; his other kidney will eventually expand to 1.5 times its volume to replace its twin.


The Monday immediately after his surgery, Lynch was already back to work.


“I think that it's just a good way to contribute,” he says of his experience. “It's something that really didn’t impact me much, yet it may really make a difference for somebody else.”