Bethany Black (@[email protected])
mastodon.social
After all these years I’m rarely surprised by medical misogyny, but finding out that the research from the first ever tests on period products using blood instead of water were published LAST WEEK is one of those surprises.

Archive link to story here: https://archive.ph/HVNLH

Posted here because there is no community for Absolutely Infuriating (that I know of).

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    36•1 year ago

    Maybe, maybe not. Blood stocks are precious but they do go out of date and blood banks would jump at the chance to do something useful with the wastage. It would also be perfectly possible to do RCTs with actual women. At the very least, it would be possible to produce a liquid with the right sort of viscosity instead of using water or saline. It’s just so ridiculously shit.

    • @[email protected]English
      18•1 year ago

      It sounds like nobody actually wanted to test with actual blood - not that there were technical or logistical difficulties, because if this was any other industrial problem, solutions would have been found the second time the problem showed up.

      I don’t understand what the concerns against using real blood were. Was it expensive? Government regulated? It could have atleast had animals blood testing or something, or are we suddenly balking at all the butchering in the food industries now too?

      I don’t agree with testing with real women though. That’s pretty much the same as saying skincare should be tested on real people, right? It should be TESTED elsewhere, and USED by women.

      • bane_killgrind
        22•1 year ago

        My take is blood is a biohazard unless it’s quality is regulated, and therefore it’s a biohazard unless it’s expensive. I’ll go read the article in a bit maybe I’m wrong.

        • @[email protected]English
          8•1 year ago

          It is a biohazard, but that’s not a good reason not to use it, just use appropriate ppe and disposal

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        16•1 year ago

        Every drug you take is tested on real people. They are asked to give informed consent, of course. But we don’t just decide that something looks like it might work and start prescribing it. Testing period products is a trivial ask compared to something like chemotherapy. Bless every single person who consents to participate, we’d be fucked without them.

      • flicker
        15•1 year ago

        Anecdotally, when I was a child and an ad for maxi pads came on TV showing that blue liquid, I had to listen to my father bitch about how there shouldn’t be ads for menstrual products because they’re “disgusting.” And he shouldn’t “have to think of that.”

        …so it’s anecdotal only but I may have a theory about why…