The Health and Human Services Committee, in its recommendations, noted that current policy permits some potentially high-risk blood donations and prevents some possible low-risk donations. But the panel said existing research isn’t adequate to justify lifting the ban.

“This decision is outrageous, irresponsible and archaic,” Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, said in a statement.

“We expect more out of this advisory committee and this administration than to uphold an unnecessarily discriminatory policy from another era.”

The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates blood donations, has final say over the blood rules. It currently forbids any man who has had sex with another man in the last 33 years from giving blood.

The FDA policy was imposed in 1985, amidst the early days of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Experts testifying before federal health officials this week said the ban is out of step with advances in screening for HIV and other diseases.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the lower house adopted a measure Monday to strike a line of state code that directed the Department of Mental Health to conduct research into “the causes and cures of sexual deviation” including “the causes and cures of homosexuality.”

Supporters say a change was long overdue in the law, which was written in 1950 in reaction to a series of sex crimes, including the molestation and murder of a 6-year-old girl in Los Angeles.

The bill, approved 62-0 Monday by the state Assembly, now goes to the state Senate.

At issue is a 60-year-old section of the Welfare and Institutions code that classifies homosexuals as “sexual deviants” and directs the state Department of Mental Health to conduct research on “deviations conducive to sex crimes against children.”

The bill moved out of the Assembly Committee on Public Safety on a 4-0 vote, with one Democrat and two Republican members abstaining from voting.

They said the law’s reference to homosexuality should be removed but that they want the state to continue researching sex crimes.

The nation’s largest doctors’ group has agreed to join efforts to repeal the military’s ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, Associated Press reports:

The American Medical Association says the ‘don’t ask, don’t-tell’ law creates an ethical dilemma for gay service members and the doctors who treat them.

The AMA also voted to declare that gay marriage bans contribute to health disparities for gay couples and their children.

Marriage bans leave gay and lesbian families vulnerable to being excluded from health care benefits, health insurance and family and medical leave rights, the AMA said.

Both gay-rights policies were adopted Tuesday at the AMA’s interim policy meeting in Houston.

The health disparities policy is based on evidence showing that married couples are more likely to have health insurance, and that the uninsured have a high risk for “living sicker and dying younger,” said Dr. Peter Carmel, an AMA board member.

Same-sex families lack other benefits afforded married couples, including tax breaks, spouse benefits under retirement plans and Social Security survivor benefits — all of which can put their health at risk, according to an AMA council report presented at the meeting.

An experimental treatment strategy involving a vaccine that is tailor-made from an HIV-positive person’s virus and immune system cells can reduce viral load and improve the function of the immune system, according to a presentation at the AIDS Vaccine 2009 conference in Paris on October 21 that was announced by the vaccine’s developer, Argos Therapeutics, and reported recently by POZ.com.

Preventive vaccines work by stimulating the immune system so that when it encounters an infectious pathogen, it will quickly respond and keep the infection from taking hold.

A therapeutic vaccine is also designed to provoke an immune response, but in people already infected with a virus or bacteria. Its aim is to help the body better control the infection. A number of therapeutic vaccines have been tried in HIV disease, but have not proved successful until now.

Jean-Pierre Routy, MD, from McGill University Health Centre in Montreal, gave one of two presentations at the AIDS Vaccine 2009 conference on AGS-004.

Routy presented data on 16 people with HIV who interrupted their antiretroviral (ARV) therapy for 12 weeks after achieving undetectable viral loads and then receiving the vaccine.

Thirteen of the 16 patients had a viral load at the end of their 12-week treatment interruption that was lower than their viral load before starting ARV treatment. The average reduction in virus was about 80 percent.

No signs of significant side effects were reported.

Full story, POZ.com.