Bloody shame: unnecessary regulations are making blood banks run dry.

• Author: Waters, Caroline

IF YOU WALKED into a blood donation center before the HIV crisis, you would have been asked 15 quick questions, then either accepted as a donor or not. Today those questions have burgeoned to almost 50, and the list continues to grow.

The extra caution stems from a colossal error that blood bank officials made two decades ago, when they ignored the early warning signs of HIV and failed to implement appropriate screening and cleaning procedures. As a result, America's blood supply became contaminated and 20,000 people were infected with the deadly virus. It's no surprise that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has decided to take no further chances. But its efforts to prevent another HIV fiasco may create a different sort of disaster: a blood supply that is extremely safe but too small to meet the nation's needs.

In response to recent outbreaks of such illnesses as SARS, West Nile virus, and the human form of mad cow disease (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), the FDA is forcing blood banks to follow rules that substantially increase the odds that a donor will be rejected. Safety experts consider many of these rules, known as deferrals, nonsensical, and they warn that the restrictions are reducing the donor base so drastically that hospitals would not have enough blood in the event of a large-scale crisis.

Blood Simple

One of the most disparaged restrictions on donors is called the European deferral, which is aimed at reducing the risk that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease will enter the U.S. blood supply. To date, there is no conclusive evidence that the disease can be transmitted via blood, although the FDA argues that studies have shown it is theoretically possible. The mandate bars donors who lived in the U.K. for three months or more between 1980 and 1996 or in Europe for six months or more from 1980 to 1990. Other restrictions exclude people who have had a headache with fever in the previous week; men who have had sexual relations with other men since 1977; women who have had sex with a man who has had sex with another man since 1977; people who have experienced angina in the previous year; and anyone who has received a tattoo in the previous year.

The rules have produced no shortage of critics. One is Arthur Caplan, a University of Pennsylvania medical ethicist who until last year served on the FDA's Blood Supply Advisory Committee. "The blood shortage is the worst challenge the health system faces in terms of doing without a key biological...