The New York Times tweeted a headline that seemed worthy of celebrating:

F.D.A. Lifting Ban on Gay Blood Donors http://t.co/IVsdD4zaBk — NYTimes Health (@nytimeshealth) December 23, 2014

Read on, however, and you'll hit a whopper of an exception:

"[On Tuesday, the F.D.A lifted …] the lifetime ban but kept in place a more modest block on donations by men who have had sex with other men in the last 12 months."

"Modest" is one way to put it. I prefer "ridiculous"—the word Barry Zingman, M.D., medical director of the AIDS Center at Montefiore Medical Center and a professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, chose to describe the original ban when I interviewed him in 2013 for the Men's Health feature, Banned for Life.

It's not just ridiculous because it excludes every gay man who had sex in 2014—which is every gay man I know.

A little background: The policy banning gay donors was crafted in the 1980s near the height of the HIV/AIDS panic. Statistically, gay men were—and still are—far more likely than the rest of the general population to contract HIV. And since HIV testing didn't exist in the '80s, the FDA had no choice but to ban gay male blood donors.

Modern testing, however, is remarkably accurate—99.99 percent accurate, as Zingman told me. Every sample of blood collected by the Red Cross and other clinics, in fact, is tested for the virus, and the odds of an HIV-positive sample surviving that process are roughly 1 in 2 million.

Today, the FDA proved that it's still scared of those odds—but a little less scared than most of the world. Call it progress.

Mike Darling Mike Darling is an executive editor at Men’s Health where he assigns and edits coverage around the brand’s core subject areas, including fitness, style and grooming, sex and relationships, and technology and gear.

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