You may have heard about Rohn Neugebauer, an otherwise-healthy 48-year-old Pennsylvania man who died suddenly of a heart attack on March 16. As ThinkProgress tells the story, Neugebauer (above) had raised funds for his local organ donation group and wanted to be a donor himself, but was rejected because he was gay.

Indeed, the organ donation group had no choice: FDA and CDC guidelines ban tissue and organ donation from men who have had sex with another man in the preceding five years. (The CDC makes an exception “if the risk … of not performing the transplant is deemed to be greater than the risk of HIV transmission and disease.”)

What many people don’t realize is that, decades after the development of reliable HIV tests, the U.S. government continues to prohibit gay men from donating blood — period. The ban applies even to men who use safe-sex practices, or who are in monogamous relationships, or who haven’t had sex with another man in years.

Under FDA rules, men who have had sex with other men (MSM) at any time since 1977 — even just once — are barred from giving blood. The FDA’s rationale: MSM are at greatly increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and other infections that can be transmitted by transfusion. While the agency acknowledges that "HIV tests currently in use are highly accurate,” it adds that tests “still cannot detect HIV 100% of the time.” (Intravenous drug users and sex workers are also prohibited from donating blood.)

LGBT groups have periodically challenged the ban as discriminatory and unsound from a public health standpoint because it is based on sexual orientation rather than sexual practice. The most recent push to revise the rules came last year, the 30th anniversary of the ban.

But federal officials, blood banks, and some patient advocates remain resistant to changing the rules, fearing a recurrence of the catastrophic contamination of the blood supply that happened early in the AIDS era. Last December, a federal panel declined again to lift the ban, opting instead to conduct more research.

Meanwhile, a number of countries —including South Africa, Australia, Sweden, Spain, and Italy — have lifted their bans or loosened restrictions so that only men who have had sex with another man within a certain time period are barred from giving blood (in the U.K., the previous 12 months; in Canada, five years). (Russia, on the other hand, reinstated its blanket ban last year as part of a broader anti-gay campaign.)

The Williams Institute, an LGBT think tank, noted in a 2010 report that the prohibition affects more than 7 million American men; lifting the ban could increase blood donation in the U.S. by more than 200,000 pints per year.

(Images, from top Neugebauer taken from YouTube screenshot, via ThinkProgress; “I tried” NYU badge via Google images; “No gays allowed” via GrowingUpBryce.com, via Google; chart via Gay Men’s Health Crisis; charts via the Williams Institute)