Sampiro I’d accept your blood if I was in need. My, doesn’t that sound ghoulish? I do need to paint a pentagram on someone’s garage door soon…Halloween is a comin’!!!111!!! I keed. It’s really a Happy Face in Blood I want to do. Y’know, something with panache!
Would ‘sex for household chores being completed in a timely fashion’ be unethical as well? Oh dear, I just broke rule #72 of Married Women Guide Book.
Discuss your CFS status with your primary physician vis-a-vis blood donations. If he/she doesn’t fell confident, get he/she to ask a friendly neighborhood haemotologist.
The blood people from time to time update their “bad things list.” You’re fine giving provided that they know about your CFS and that your primary clears you to give.
As for the main topic.
The problem with virally driven disease like hepatitis and HIV, as well as HPV and CMV, and herpes…is that there is a delay from initial infection to seroconversion, and moreover, virii are hard to isolate from the blood.
So they identify sub-groups at high risk for these viral infections, and screen them out of the process.
The cost of virally screening these samples, together with the risk of passing the virus on to recipients offsets the value of accepting the donations.
Could you expand on this a bit…in layperson’s terms?
I’ve been on both sides of the fence (not that one). I spent 6 years working in hospital blood banks, and helped save several lives because I had blood on the shelf that I could give immediately. I am otherwise healthy and take care of myself, but I lived in France for a year, back in 1989-90, which means I’m at risk to die from Swiss-cheese brain disease, and could pass that on to others through my blood. They recently relaxed the rules for me, saying that I needed to spend more time eating diseased cow parts before I start getting holes in my head.
A bit irreverent, yes, but considering the broad stroke of the brush, it’s worth noting.
On the other hand, there are folks out there who have hematochromatosis, or iron overload. For reasons of diet, genetics or both, they have too much iron in their system. The treatment? Bleeding, as in taking a pint of blood out once every two weeks or so until their hemaglobin and hematocrit values fall into a normal range. That can take months, and they can end up giving gallons before they have a safe iron level. I recall a memo some years ago from some agency specifically stating that such blood was unfit for transfusion because it was the result of a pathological condition, meanwhile, gallons of otherwise normal blood from such treatments are discarded as biohazardous waste every day. Of all the medical ironies, this one was the deepest for me, as the only thing wrong with the patient was they were making too many red cells because they had too much iron. That’s it. Nothing contagious, everything biologically and chemically correct in that unit, except for the circumstances of the donor.
Again with the broad brush.
What I see is that it boils down to policy makers and the public unwilling to accept the fact that there is no difference between 0.000000001% and 0.00001% chance of an adverse event, and neither willing to believe that 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000ad nauseum0% chance of an adverse event is impossible. The response I’ve heard to allowing miniscule chances has been an accusatory “what if it was your blood you were getting!?” Foregoing the faulty logic, that is a decent question to ask: would you want to receive blood from someone who has your health and lifestyle history? We just have to recall Ryan White to understand that just such tragic events have happened, and did so out of personal, bureaucratic and biochemical ignorance or recklessness.
If you have tested negative, repeatedly, over the past several years, the ARC tests will not show anything new except for a possible false positive. If you have repeatedly tested negative within a year of having sex with a man, the ARC tests aren’t going to show anything different. Unlike some, you, Sampiro understand your circumstances, the consequences of your actions and the broad brush that you often are painted with. I trust, then, that you can make the decision that best fits your circumstances as well as the needs of the sick and dying who could benefit from donated blood.
Vlad/Igor
So, do I have this right? They pool, as it were, “test” blood. But the “donating” blood remains always in its individual pints (until given to the patient). If a problem is detected with the batch, then all the individual pints in that batch are chucked away. How many pints would typically make up one batch?
How so exactly? What’s the connection between a positive sample and (increased) risk of false negatives? Wouldn’t false negatives slip through the system, anyway?
Sure. When you are infected with certain viruses or bacteria, your immune system responds by making antibodies. These antibodies can be easily detected by standard laboratory tests now for a wide range of infectious diseases. The time between the virus first entering your body and the time antibodies appear in detectable levels (i.e. seroconversion) can vary from days to weeks to months, depending on the infectious agent and the health of your immune system.
The rule of thumb, I believe, is 6 months for seroconversion for HIV, which is one of the longer time frames. This is one of the reasons why HIV was transmitted by donated blood products back when it first appeared, another being that the tests for the virus itself or the resulting antibodies were not that sensitive or specific. Now we know much more about the infectious process and have improved the tests.
Vlad/Igor
Each individual unit of blood is tested separately for a range of transmissible diseases, and those test results are forever linked to that unit of blood. I have handled numerous “look back” directives requesting that my lab identify who the recipient of a specific unit of blood was, because of an issue with the donor of that unit.
Vlad/Igor
Isn’t it at least time to re-think the cut-off year?
1977 (the cutoff year for my area blood bank) was 28 years ago.
I know that the virus can lay dormant for a while - but I was under the impression that it will become apparent within 5-10 years at the longest.
Are we finding cases of people who contracted HIV in 1980 and didn’t know it until 2005? I would have thought that the overwhelming majority of people who contracted HIV in the very early 80s would be aware by now that they’ve got it.
The issue, from a blood bank point of view, is: What protocol do we follow to provide the safest possible blood supply?
People are fallible, and most people are prone to thinking of themselves as special cases whether or not they are. People tend to live in fantasy worlds and subjective judgements aren’t particularly good ones.
The question isn’t whether or not you are safe to give blood. The question is whether from a statistical standpoint if you belong to a group who is likely to provide safe blood. Because, when you are dealing with large groups of people in a statistical fashion, individuals aren’t particularly important.
What makes a protocol work is that it takes fallible and immeasurable human judgement out of the equation and puts things in a purely statistical perspective.
So, in fact, the process is important. The process changes the protocols only after very careful consideration. The protocols are often wrong, or behind the times.
This in no way changes the fact that the protocols and the processes involved are still important even if they are flawed and wrong, as they seem to be now.
Flawed and wrong processes and protocols can be fixed. They are supposed to be overcautious. They can be wrong and the blood supply can still be safe. If the blood supply is unsafe they can be fixed.
But, this is the kicker. If we allow subjective judgements we step outside of the possibility of measuring risk in a statistical sense and we can no longer state that the blood supply is safe.
Therefore, I put to you that ethically you should answer the questions truthfully, and be disqualified. You are still serving the cause of a safe blood supply because you are supplying a data point. In your case, the data point is a person who is disqualified from giving blood because of a protocol.
Ideally, this data point can be one of many that can be analyzed to determine knew and better protocols to ensure a safe and adequate blood supply. Even if it’s not (which is the sad likelihood,) you are doing your part.
Some miscellaneous things:
Yes, I’m positive I’m free of any STDs, HIV or otherwise.
Yes, I have been tested. (I have to have blood drawn several times per year to monitor what I’ll only describe as a non-transmissible “health issue” and when they do the bloodwork anyway they test for hepatitis, HIV, etc., as a routine thing.
I will wait through the initial hurdles and if there really is a crying shortage I’ll fudge my answers and donate, but until I hear on the nightly news that it’s a desperate need I’ll keep it inside.
I’d rather be stabbed with a needle, thanks. 
(Is this what they mean by “one man’s meat is another man’s poison”?)
I’m not sure that blood remains in individual pints, it may get pooled, too. However, IIRC they do dump the entire batch (either pol or individual pints) because they can’t finish the followup testing before the deadline to send out the batch.
Sorry, that was unclear. I meant that every infected sample increases the risk of a false negative, whether due to a problem with the test itself or the lack of an immune response in the infected individual.
mischievous
They are somewhere in the process of changing that rule, so if this blood is still unavailable for use, it will be in the next couple of years.
Which frustrated me because I based a whole Angel fanfic on hemachromatosis.
I am having a similar moral dilemma. I am also 100% sure I have no STDs or other transmissible medical conditions. In fact, my local blood bank agrees with me. However, the first time (and only) I gave blood, my blood presented a false positive. They agreed it was false, my doctor followed up, and it was false.
Nevertheless, I am never allowed to donate there again, I assume because of the cost involved in dealing with false positives. However, the people I spoke to told me it was likely just a fluke, and that I probably wouldn’t test false positive again. On the other hand, it could conceivably be just some quirk of my blood.
I’ve moved somewhere new, and there’s a different organization collecting blood. Do I tell them that I was refused elsewhere?
This is what I was trying to ascertain in the gay guys giving blood thread. Any definitive answer on this?
I think a reasonable perspective can be: once I donate, it’s their blood, and the blood bank is entitled to know its provenance. If there is something in my high-risk questionnaire that trips a flag, then presumably this causes my blood to be less desirable, even to the point of being rejected.
While I understand the altruistic motivation for donating even when falling into a high-risk category, it seems like it would be patronizing (in the bad sense of the word) to presume to know better than the blood collection agency what’s in their best interest. I hope that I am sensitive to other viewpoints on this, though.
:smack: Maybe it wasn’t clear, but I was trying to agree with Scylla’s statement, and then extend the reasoning based on my own perspective. Hope that makes it clearer.
Here in Northern Ireland I don’t fall into any of the risk groups. Straight, never travelled to places like Africa, only ever had one sexual partner from the same country who had herself tested already not so long ago, don’t abuse drugs intraveneously etc etc
So I never really think about the guidelines other than knowing I’m quite acceptable for donating. Maybe it would be different if I moved to the US and fell under the blanket ban on EU citizens (because of BSE in our meat) but for the moment I would prefer if blood was collected under the rules laid down by the donation organisation. Quite a few people appear on message boards determined to donate even though they shouldn’t under the guidelines, I’d prefer if those guidelines were adhered to.