The ban on gay & bi men donating their eyes is leaving thousands blind

Anatomy of the human eye
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

While the LGBTQ community is well aware of the FDA’s ban on blood donation by any man who has had sex with another man in past three months, few people are aware there is a separate ban 20 times as long for gay and bisexual donors of eye tissue.

Some forms of blindness can be cured with a corneal transplant surgery using cornea tissue that is recovered from the eyes of a deceased donor. However, federal regulations in the U.S. and Canada severely restrict the ability of sexually active gay and bisexual men to donate their eye tissue when they die.

Related: FDA loosens the gay blood ban in response to coronavirus pandemic

Since 1994, federal policy in the U.S. has banned men from becoming cornea donors if they have had sex with another man in the past five years. Canada similarly bans corneal donations from men who had sex with another man during the previous 12 months.

These bans caused the loss of an estimated 1558 to 3217 corneal donations from gay and bisexual men in 2018, according to a new study published on September 24 in the medical journal JAMA Ophthalmology. With millions of people across the world in need of corneal transplant surgery, these discarded corneas from gay and bisexual men could have been used to safely restore vision to thousands of blind patients.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s ban on corneal donation…

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