On the ravages of Covid in post-election America. Documentary THE INVENTOR: OUT FOR BLOOD IN SILICON VALLEY, Examining the Rise and Fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Her Multibillion Dollar Healthcare Technology Company Theranos, Debuts March 18 on HBO. “I was told that due to antiquated and discriminatory guidelines by the FDA to prevent HIV, I am ineligible to donate blood because I’m a gay man.” He thundered on: “When so many people are sick and dying . New email subscribers receive a free copy of our current issue. Follow @HBOPR for more news and information. Sherlock vs. Sherlock: A Study in Visual Storytelling, Respectability Politics Can Get in the Way of a Good Story, Meet the ‘WaltRight’: The Disney Diehards Demanding Parks Stay Alcohol-Free. Meet George Frodsham, who is a UK biochemist and has found out a way of removing disease-causing microbes from the blood by making use of magnets known as MediSieve technology. A Medical Technology degree from UWO will prepare you for a challenging and rewarding career in healthcare laboratories. After all, gay marriage can end in gay divorce.). Out for Blood On bids to reform blood donation policy for men who have sex with men ... Benjamin Weil is a PhD candidate at University College London in the Science and Technology Studies Department, where he researches blood donor activism in the UK. For political opponents of the “gay blood ban,” a three-month deferral period for MSM still represents an effective prohibition on gay blood; it precludes openly gay and bisexual men from visible participation in the civic practice of blood donation. “The characters are at once larger-than-life and real.”. He adds that a deeper understanding of stem cells can also help with stem cells transplants for the treatment of blood cancers in the future, by potentially stimulating and growing these cells ex vivo (out of the body) for improved transplantation. This can give a better reflection of your blood pressure, as being tested in somewhere like a GP surgery can make you feel anxious and can affect the result. Zachary Tracer. While the move to a three-month deferral policy for MSM was acknowledged by blood donor activists and other advocates for “gay blood ban” reform as representing a modicum of progress, they were swift to criticize the new deferral period as not going far enough. February 08, 2019. Vacuum technology removes dangerous blood clots in heart Date: January 28, 2014 Source: Orlando Health Summary: An innovative vacuum technology can remove potentially deadly, large clots. “This story is a classic example of truth is more dramatic than fiction,” says Alex Gibney. The preserved blood is later used for blood transfusion. She started developing lab-on-a-chip technology for blood tests, with the idea to start a company that would make blood tests cheaper, more convenient and accessible to consumers. For these men, donation policy reform is a necessary and overdue recognition of the shifting landscape of HIV testing, treatment, and prevention. . Another CDC report published in the same year suggested that Black and poor people are at significantly higher risk of HIV infection and subsequently developing AIDS-related illnesses, a result of reduced access and barriers to health care, HIV testing, and life-saving antiretroviral medication. Crucially, this epidemiology is classed and racialized. In 1983, as reports of AIDS-related illness among recipients of blood donations, many of whom were patients with hemophilia, began to fill the desks of blood transfusion service officials across the world, certain “high risk” groups—including MSM, commercial sex workers, intravenous drug users, and, later, people who have been sexually active in “high risk” regions like sub-Saharan Africa—were asked to self-defer from giving blood. PrEP use, for instance, still operates in a zone of epistemic uncertainty for blood services: the only published study on the matter suggests that PrEP’s viral suppression properties can produce “false negative” results in tests of donated blood samples. Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, HBO’s Emmy-winning Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) directs a documentary investigating the rise and fall of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar healthcare company founded by Elizabeth Holmes.Read More The device is made of a nano-engineered glass that fluoresces when stimulated by … When several countries, including the United States and UK, began recruiting recovered Covid-19 patients for trials exploring the possibility of using donated antibodies as a treatment for coronavirus infection, a number of gay men complained that the three-month deferral criteria still prohibited them from taking part in a possible solution to a national crisis. If someone is out for blood, they are trying to find someone to blame and punish for something bad that has happened. and . Holmes dropped out of Stanford to found Theranos in 2003, promising a technology that would provide accurate blood tests with just a pin-prick of blood. Technology has been too poor to assess all the symptoms, or the waiting list is too long, so patients lose out. Blood could be diagnosed easily without the need for many vials of blood drawn The problem with centering this political symbolism within blood donor activism is that it belies the material realities of testing for BBIs. This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline "Bayhing for blood or Doling out cash?" Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts But those who aren’t lucky enough to pass the purity tests of blood donor activism far exceed a critical gaze on gay sex. He and his collaborators have launched a startup, Akna Dx, to commercialize it. Test results could be delivered to a patient’s phone in hours, and a single test would cost less than half of the reimbursement rate of Medicare and Medicaid. It’s now worth more than $9 billion, and poised to change health care. In her seminal critical text, Terrorist Assemblages, the queer theorist Jasbir Puar writes, “There is a transition under way in how queer subjects are relating to nation-states, particularly the United States, from being figures of death (i.e., the AIDS epidemic) to becoming tied to ideas of life and productivity (i.e., gay marriage and families).” Implied here by Puar is that such a move is only made possible if life-bringing queer subjects, on their journey into the national fold, are willing to leave behind and overtly repudiate their figurative associations with death. Even monogamy is porous and frequently perverted. Even though “all donated blood is screened,” as innumerable “gay blood ban” reformists insist as a way of highlighting the apparent redundancy of deferral policies, even the most advanced of BBI testing technologies, including nucleic acid tests for HIV, are not infinitely sensitive. Accordingly, the loosening of donation criteria in the face of a possible blood crisis induced by coronavirus ought to be a reminder of who and what is at stake in the negotiation of blood donor deferral criteria: namely, the health of the patient. “Low-risk” practices like monogamy and condom use are, therefore, put forth as insurance against the blind spots of BBI testing. Trumpism throws a tantrum in the nation's capital. Inasmuch as unequal patterns of HIV transmission persist, with proximity to risk and health outcomes structured by the intersections of race, class, and sexuality, the HIV/AIDS crisis is not, and should not be considered by any stretch of the imagination, over. This move has, predictably, come in for criticism by the usual group of adversaries of the so-called “gay blood ban.” These blood donor activists are, predominantly, a cohort of self-identified “healthy” gay and bisexual men who have taken issue with MSM donor policy as perpetuating what they deem to be an outdated HIV/AIDS-linked homophobia that marks all gay and bisexual men—regardless of their sexual practices or, indeed, HIV status—as possible infection risks. Speciating “low-risk” from “high-risk” MSM, a now familiar pattern emerges: good, married, monogamous, condom-using gay men are set against their perverse, barebacking, promiscuous, non-monogamous opposites. He points out, though, that a spinal tap to test for biomarkers in CSF is invasive, and brain scanning is expensive. Share. Addressing the “gay blood ban” alongside other forms of exclusionary blood donor deferral criteria, including bans on sex workers and intravenous drug users and onerous restrictions on migrant populations, requires confronting the true nature and causes of an unequal landscape of HIV transmission: institutional and systemic racism; homophobia; economic barriers to testing; uneven access to and poor representation within HIV education; the prohibitive cost of PrEP and antiretroviral medication; stigma amongst and between affected communities; the hostile environment for immigrants; the criminalization and hyper-policing of sex work and drug use; limited access to needle exchanges, and so on. They lose out because the diagnosis has just taken too long—and not because of inaccuracy for the doctors. . out for blood. The imagined “gay blood donor,” then, is the good gay citizen: hygienic, heroic, and worthy of fusion with the heterosexual national body. “I was told that due to antiquated and discriminatory guidelines by the FDA to prevent HIV, I am ineligible to donate blood,” Andy Cohen fumed, gesturing to himself and emphasizing the “I” of “I am.” “I, me, Andy Cohen,” he appears to say. We're not out for blood, we're out for justice. The bottom line is this: the sexualized, racialized, and classed nature of the HIV crisis cannot be addressed by pursuing symbolic reforms that center condom-using, monogamous and, tacitly white, middle-class gay men. Blood analysis, laboratory examination of a sample of blood used to obtain information about its physical and chemical properties. 2. 1. 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