Thread: Hemophilia?

So hopefully some medical expertise is available to answer this one it's been bugging me since this afternoon.
I gave blood this afternoon, I filled out the standard questionnaire, Do you use intervenous drugs? Have you ever had sex for drugs or money? Have you recently been treated for an STD? Sexual contact with anyone with HIV or Hepatitis? Been in jail lately? etc. All very understandable questions for someone donating blood, right?

Then there was one I totally didn't get, "Have you had sex with anyone that has hemophilia?" Couple things here, most hemophiliacs are men and being about as hetrosexual as they come, even if I had multiple partners, a hemophiliac would be a virtual impossiblity. Then I started thinking, wait, hemophilia is a genetic disorder, one of those things that you either have or don't have and certainly can't give to someone else even with sexual contact. So, if I was a woman and had regular sexual contact with a hemophiliac man, what would that have to do with my blood? Perhaps the risk of a hemophiliac receiving HIV contaminated blood (back in the 70's or 80's)?

it is a genetic disorder that is passed down trough combination of genes from the parents ...
may be that was the reason for the question?

Hemophilia is sex linked, meaning most generally a male disorder. It requires an unopposed expression of a single gene. This happens because the Y chromosome is shorter and exposes the carrier X from the mother leading to that gene being expressed and the male child having hemophilia. It would be very rare for a woman to inherit two defective hemophilia chromosomes, not impossible but really rare. You can't get hemophilia from intercourse.

Hemophiliacs require blood products to stop or prevent a hemorrhage. Until the mid 1980's those blood products were often derived from a large donor pool, of whom many were homosexual men with a little understood disease now known as HIV/AIDS. The blood pool wasn't screened like it is today, and many hemophiliacs developed HIV infections. Now there are recombinant DNA derived blood factors that are no risk for this kind of contamination. There is sometimes, bleeding associated with sex, even microscopic and thus the potential for exposure to HIV or other blood borne pathogens. One answer is yes, the risk of HIV infection from someone with a much higher risk of exposure to HIV.

The typical question is usually "Are you hemophiliac or have you ever had to take blood based products to prevent bleeding?" I've never heard the one about having sex with hemophiliacs. I'm somewhere over 25 pints and the questions have always been the same. Maybe the questioner was new to the job.

Yeah, a very large percentage of hemophiliacs had/have all kinds of blood transferable diseases. If I remember right, the clotting agent they need used to be made by basically separating a big batch of blood from about a 100+ donors in a centrifuge. So if there was one pint of bad blood in it it contaminated the whole batch.