New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joined 17  U.S. senators in calling on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) to overturn a ban on gay men donating blood.

The ban, established during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, prevents men who have engaged in sex with other men from giving blood. The U.S. senators sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg urging her to lift the restriction.

However, many states criminalize gay men donating blood, so even if the FDA lifted the ban, gay males in those states could still be prosecuted by the state.

“We live in a very different country than we did in 1983,” said the letter to the FDA Commissioner, which is posted on the Web site of U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Democrat from Massachusetts. “Today, the high-risk behaviors associated with HIV contraction are more fully understood, and dramatic technological improvements have been made in HIV detection.”

The lawmakers stressed that the science has changed dramatically since the ban was established in 1983 at the advent of the HIV-AIDS crisis. Today donated blood must undergo two different, highly accurate tests that make the risk of tainted blood entering the blood supply virtually zero, they said.

The senators said that while hospitals and emergency rooms are in urgent need of blood products, “healthy blood donors are turned away every day due to an antiquated policy and our blood supply is not necessarily any safer for it.”

The letter also cited a report by the American Red Cross, America’s Blood Centers and the AABB (formerly the American Association of Blood Banks) calling the ban “medically and scientifically unwarranted.”

The FDA, in a statement, said that “while FDA appreciates concerns about perceived discrimination, our decision to maintain the deferral policy is based on current science.”  It said that while some groups favor relaxing restrictions, others, “such as those representing the hemophilia community, support continuation of the current policy.”

People with hemophilia, a bleeding disorder, require periodic transfusions and in the past, before screening techniques were improved to ensure blood was HIV-free, were among those most at risk of contracting the virus.