Desperately-needed donated corneas from gay and bisexual men are being thrown away instead of used to help thousands of people to restore their eyesight. Some forms of blindness and visual impairment can be cured with corneal transplant surgery using donated eye tissue.
However, federal regulations in the United States and Canada severely restrict the ability of sexually active gay and bisexual men from donating their eye tissue.
A new study published in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology has found that the restriction disqualified as many as 3,217 corneal donations from gay and bisexual men in 2018.
Corneal donation in the US is limited by a decades-old policy that bans men from becoming donors if they have had sex with another man in the