Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410110046
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
DATELINE: CHICAGO LENGTH: Medium
And that gap is prompting medical officials to warn patients that despite tests, there is risk - although minuscule - in transfusions.
Across the nation, many doctors and hospitals are expanding efforts to offer patients alternatives to using strangers' blood in transfusions, including giving patients the option of stockpiling their own blood before surgery.
The gap exists because it can take six weeks for a person newly infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, to develop enough antibodies for the most common, first-line test to detect it. Thus, blood donated by someone newly infected can make its way into the blood supply, blood officials said.
Two states - New Jersey and California - have enacted laws requiring physicians to warn patients of transfusion pitfalls and alternatives, said Cynthia Kelly, general counsel for the American Association of Blood Banks. In other states, similar bills have been considered.
Even where it isn't the law, doctors and hospitals increasingly tell patients to stockpile their own blood, called autologous donations, when possible, for use in surgery. Many patients are doing so.
``People don't want other people's blood,'' said Dr. John Martell, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Chicago Hospitals.
Martell said 95 percent of his patients store their blood for later surgery. The ``public is so hyped about the AIDS scare and hepatitis and things you can get,'' he said.
That reaction comes despite the blood supply's being safer than ever, according to experts, who say the antibody tests are getting faster and more precise. Food and Drug Administration researchers, for instance, recently estimated that in blood that has been screened, only one unit out of 420,000 was HIV-infected.
Furthermore, the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recorded only 29 reported cases of transfusion-related AIDS since testing of donated blood began in March 1985. However, some experts estimate that there may be several hundred more people who have been infected. At least 30 million people have received transfusions since 1985, blood bank officials said.
HIV is not the only virus that can slip by a blood test. So can hepatitis C, a virus more prevalent than HIV and that often causes liver cirrhosis and cancer. Even so, the likelihood of infection by transfusion is less than one-tenth of 1 percent, a CDC epidemiologist said.
But just one case of transfusion-related infection is too many, medical experts say. So researchers are working on more sensitive tests that are inexpensive and that can detect infected blood sooner.
by CNB