Bad Blood

In 2009 the New Zealand Blood Service (NZBS) changed their deferral criteria for donating blood based on a 2008 review. The men who have sex with men (MSM) ban was reduced from 10 years to five years—“You must not give blood for: five years following oral or anal sex with or without a condom with another man (if you are male)”. There will be another review of the criteria in 2013.

Other deferral criteriaBlood donor

About 12% of people who try to donate blood are deferred. The NZBS has a full list of deferral criteria on their website.

A one year deferral is in place for a woman who has had sex with a MSM, and for those who have had sex with a person who carries the hepatitis B or C viruses, or an injecting drug user, a sex worker, a person with haemophilia or related condition, or with a person who has lived in or comes from a country with high HIV prevalence. People who have worked as sex workers only in New Zealand can’t give blood for a year.

People who have worked as sex workers outside of New Zealand or who have lived in a country with a high rate of HIV (including sub Saharan Africa and parts of Asia) can’t give blood for five years.

People who have injected/snorted non-prescription illegal drugs or who have lived in the UK, France or the Republic of Ireland for a total of six months or more between 1980 and 1996, because of possible exposure to Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, are permanently deferred from giving blood.

New Zealand sex workers aren’t considered to be a high HIV risk because: “there have been only 20 women diagnosed with HIV who were known to be sex workers and three to four men who were reported to be infected by a sex worker in New Zealand.”

MSM bans around the world

New Zealand isn’t as strict as other countries. Hong Kong, Singapore, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the UK have a lifetime ban on MSM donating blood. The US, Canada and Switzerland effectively do too, banning any men who have had sex with men after 1977.

Australia and Japan have a one year ban, South Africa has a six month ban, and Spain and Italy ban on behavior rather than the sex of sexual partners. Spain has a 12 month exclusion for anyone who has had more than one sexual partner in the last 12 months. The interpretation of Italy’s exclusion based on risky behavior is unclear and inconsistently applied—some centers still exclude MSM.

Blood safety

“Once a potential donor presents there is a three tier combination approach to safety: a questionnaire on behaviour followed by an interview, tests that are highly sensitive and specific are carried out on the donated blood, and (for manufactured plasma products) the use of physical and/or chemical methods to inactivate infectious agents.”

The HIV concerns that remain even though donated blood is tested relates to the early period following infection where the infection doesn’t show up on tests and relates to the risk that established infections aren’t picked up by testing or that infected blood is identified but fails to be removed from the system. The early “window period” for HIV averages to be about 12 days using Nucleic Acid Testing, which the NZBS tests with. A short deferral period of a year would eliminate the risk of window period infections. Longer deferral periods reduce the risk established infections present.

It’s thought that people with a higher risk of having HIV would also have a higher risk of having an “unknown or untested for infectious [agent]”.

The risk of the test system failing to detect an infection where “the marker is present” is very low because of the features of modern testing equipment used and because NZBS tests for each major virus twice. However “the test system may be unable to detect a rare form of the virus”.

“No transmissions have been documented in New Zealand since routine testing was introduced for these viruses… however… the low levels of risk are achieved by a combination of measures and are not solely due to the effect of blood donation testing.”

Australia’s one year deferral

About a decade ago, Australia dropped to a 12 month deferral for donors who have had male-to-male sex.

“Surprisingly in Australia, with a one-year deferral for MSM, though MSM are still over represented, the prevalence of HIV is only 4 per million donations, less than in New Zealand (11 per million donations). This suggests that there is either greater adherence to deferral criteria in Australia, or a higher rate of clinical HIV testing and therefore fewer undiagnosed infections, or the figures from Australia are incomplete.”

A study in Australia found there was no evidence of a significantly increased risk of transfusion-transmitted HIV subsequent to implementing the one year deferral period for MSM. In the one year deferral data the five MSM with HIV infections would have been excluded had they been honest and provided a complete history.

“We found no evidence that the implementation of the 12-month deferral for male-to-male sex resulted in an increased recipient risk for HIV in Australia. The risk of noncompliance to the revised deferral rather than its duration appears to be the most important modifier of overall risk.”

Harm

Donating blood is a valued social activity and the restriction based on sexual partners is indirectly homophobic which creates social exclusion and adds to stigma on the basis of male-to-male sex. In the US there is a group who have a “HIV prevalence 17 times that of their comparator: black versus white women”. There’s no call for a ban on that group from donating blood. Are we more sensitized to racism than homophobia?

“It does not distinguish between sexual acts… or whether a man has been in a monogamous relationship, but stigmatises any male same sex contact.”

But would a one year ban, like Australia’s, be any less discriminatory? There is an ethical requirement to protect the recipients of blood because they’ve been thrown into their situation. For indirect discrimination to be truly removed, there would have to be no ban on MSM. That’s unlikely until medical advances make it safe for the recipients of donated blood.

Image credit: Dave Herholz

“Hello, I’m calling from Microsoft…”

The “computer doctors” have been making their rounds in New Zealand. Consumer Affairs say about 17% of New Zealanders have been targeted by them. They called us, from Djibouti, from what seemed like a crowded call center. They knew our details, just like they’re listed in the phone book. I think they purposely tried to be hard to understand, using the assumption that overseas victims would think it would be rude to ask for clarification a number of times. The address they gave was actually a Border’s bookshop in Auckland. Eventually they hung up after repeated questioning.

Computer doctorThe story

Their story seems semi-plausible, but is fake: they’re calling from Microsoft or a computer repair shop and have noticed some strange activity from your computer. They tell you to go to a legitimate folder or the Windows Event Viewer and say that if there’s a lot of files or entries there (which there will be) that it’s very bad and means your computer is infected. But fear not! It can all be solved for a reasonable price, plus they’ll continue to support your computer. Just give them your credit card number to be charged a recurring fee and they’ll remotely fix your computer for you…

Don’t trust cold callers

NetSafe recommends asking for their company name and phone number and Googling them to see if they’re who they say they are. I haven’t heard of any legitimate tech support companies cold calling for customers and I don’t imagine it would be hard to create a professional looking website and redirecting a New Zealand phone number if someone overseas was truly determined. So I’d say don’t trust cold callers with remote access to your computer or your credit card information at all, even if they seem legitimate.

Legitimate help

If you need help with your computer there are people on online forums like Geeks To Go that will help you for free, or ask friends and family for a recommendation of a quality company you can visit in person.

The NetSafe post has some good links. NetBasics is an animated video series by NetSafe on staying safe online. The real Microsoft has an article on speeding up your Windows computer, another line the callers use. And the Event Viewer might seem confusing, but Microsoft provides a tool to look up what the entries mean.

Symantec’s experience

Symantec investigated a similar scam being run overseas, recorded the conversation and recorded what happened to the computer. The agent “Brian” gets Orla (who’s from Symantec and is pretending to be a novice computer user) to open the Event Viewer and tells her that she has a serious infection. But it’s alright, they can fix it!

A remote connection to the computer is set up using legitimate third-party software and it looks like their technician is doing something important by running check disk, disk cleanup and deleting some temporary files. Brian informs Orla that she has a lot of malicious files on her computer and gets her to sign up for a one year support contract to solve her issues. After receiving her credit card details insecurely via email, as well her name, address, phone number, email address, email password and getting her to fax a copy of her driver’s licence, the bad infection was “removed” by deleting the innocent items from the Event Viewer and turning off event logging. Of course, with unrestricted access to a computer, the people behind these operations have the ability to install malicious software they claim to be removing. The video is below. At the end the business is confronted about their misleading practices.

If you get called by these people, submit a report to NetSafe’s The Orb. Maybe you want to have some fun with them first. A Fair Go viewer said they apparently get very annoyed when after they’ve been trying to pitch you for half an hour you tell them you have a Mac instead of a PC.

Have you been called by these people?

Image credit: Tabitha Kaylee Hawk

Changing a Comment’s Parent Comment In WordPress

WordPress comment messSometimes someone will accidentally reply to a comment on a WordPress post instead of starting their own comment thread. This can create a set of replies that aren’t actually relevant to the original comment. They’re hard to follow and are ugly, the replies that are relevant to the original comment are hidden by the additional conversation. There’s no way to fix this through the WordPress Admin interface, but you can using phpMyAdmin. You can also use this to change what comment a comment is replying to.

 

 

  • Backup your database first.
  • Open up phpMyAdmin through cPanel.
    phpMyAdmin cPanel
  • Click on the database WordPress uses.
    phpMyAdmin Select Database
  • Click on search.
    phpMyAdmin Search
  • Search for the comment that shouldn’t be a reply (the comment that you want to outdent) inside the comments table, search for something semi-unique to the comment eg. the IP address of the commenter.
    phpMyAdmin Search Database
  • Click browse.
    phpMyAdmin Search Results
  • Click the pencil icon beside the comment.
    phpMyAdmin Edit Entry
  • Change the parent_comment value to 0.
    phpMyAdmin comment_parent

Judging a Book By Its Cover

A book on the deaths of the Kahui Twins, written by Ian Wishart in conjunction with Macsyna King, is going to be released soon. A bookshop advisory on new titles was leaked to TVNZ and publicity around the book started earlier than intended, unfortunately directly coinciding with the inquest into the death of the twins.

A Facebook group is calling for the boycott of the book, and apparently the boycott of shops who choose to sell the book, and a couple of bookstores listened. From reading some of the comments on the page, it is clear that some commenters are misinformed. Paper Plus and The Warehouse have both said that their stores won’t be stocking the book. Whitcoulls is still considering whether it will or not. Paper Plus chief executive Rob Smith said: “The health and wellbeing of children is always front of our mind when we are faced with decisions which might impact the stores and the communities in which they operate”. It’s not clear to me how stocking a book not intended for children, and which doesn’t encourage child abuse would impact the health and wellbeing of children. There actually isn’t a clear reason why the book is harmful at all, nor is there a clear reason why it shouldn’t be stocked, apart from “we don’t like it/Macsyna”. Like Steven Price says, no one has actually read the book, how can they make an informed decision that they don’t like it?

Censorship causes blindnessMacsyna King cooperated with the police and was a prosecution witness, she hasn’t just decided to speak now. She isn’t profiting from the book either, Ian says: “Apart from sharing a Domino’s pizza during lunch, Macsyna has never received anything nor will she.” Ian will earn money for the book, but points out that researching and publishing a book takes time and money and that media organizations get paid for their reporting too (apologies if there’s a country block on the video): “When I worked for TVNZ, I earned a six figure salary to do investigations into cases like this one. I had the luxury of expenses being covered, helicopters at my beck and call, and lots of lovely advertising to pay for all this.”

Books like Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler (Amazon, Book Depository) are stocked not because the sellers agree with the content, or approve of the author, but because as a society we value all viewpoints, although don’t necessarily agree with them.

Booksellers New Zealand, which represents Paper Plus and many others, says such a move is rare, and dangerous.

“It would be an attack on democracy if we started banning books that some people didn’t like,” said Booksellers. “It’s a matter of personal choice and it’s something we cherish in our democracy”.

Perhaps ironically, criticism was directed towards family members who didn’t want to speak out at the time of the death of the twins. Now someone is speaking out and people don’t want to listen to her. It’s great that companies are taking feedback into consideration, but maybe this a case of the loud minority being listened to. Boycotting a book by deciding not to buy it yourself is fine, but those people shouldn’t make a decision on behalf of everyone else. Macsyna King wants to shed some light on how her lifestyle was molded, maybe we should be listening.

Do you think the book should be stocked? Will you read it?

Image credit: Tracey R