Being a “Safety Responder” for my company. It’s that time of year where we try to round up people for a blood drive. Well without going into detail as to how much the guys in my dept. are a bunch of wussies and are afraid of needles. One co-worker said that due to one of the vaccines he recieved a while back for foreign travel he can’t give blood. Now I didn’t want to be an ass and call him on it, but I’m curious, are there vaccines that once recieved will keep you from donating blood the rest of your life? Or is this guy just chicken and using this as an excuse?
http://www.redcross.org/services/biomed/blood/learn/eligibl.html
This is the list by the red cross - I don’t see anything that indicates a vaccine will prevent you from donating blood for longer then four weeks.
Maybe he has another medical issue that prevents him from donating that he doesn’t want to talk about?
Shortly after I returned from a trip to the tropics and attempted to donate blood, I was told that I wasn’t eligible because I had been on malaria prophylaxis within the past year.
I didn’t quite understand why that was a bar to my donation of blood. I wasn’t asked if I had contracted malaria and or even if I had travelled in an area where malaria was endemic–just if I had taken anti-malarial drugs.
So I could have donated blood if I had skipped the chloroquine and gotten a raging case of vivax before coming back to the U.S.?
I think the woman interviewing me at the blood center was confused, but I don’t know what the exact restrictions are.
[Upon preview, I see that In Conceivable has posted a link to the Red Cross eligibility guidelines. The information there about malaria seems a lot more sensible than what I was told at the blood center. I guess this just illustrates that there’s a lot of misinformation about what is or is not a bar to donating blood.]
I found this Red Cross document (in Microsoft Word format) http://www.redcrossblood.com/Donor%20Eligibility%20Guidelines.doc that says that eligibility to donate blood is deferred for twelve months for “Experimental vaccinces (unlicensed)” and for the rabies series (if bitten by a rabid animal).
Is the Japanese encephalitis vaccine licensed for use in the U.S. yet? Perhaps that’s the vaccine satanslawyer’s co-worker received. I was told to get vaccinated for Japanese encephalitis when I arrived in Singapore before I spent time in the boonies of Nepal during the monsoon. I don’t think it’s an “experimental” vaccine, though–it’s just that there’s not enough demand for it in the U.S. to go through the FDA trials required for licensing.
I went to donate blood a few years ago but couldn’t. One of the questions on the questionaire that is filled out was “Were you in any of these countries in the past 4 years?”
I was in the Dominican Republic as part of a Cruise Mrs. Bernse and I went on. They wouldn’t let me donate. I am still unsure why, although I haven’t dug into it… I’m guessing AIDS being quite rampant there?
Did he go to Europe, and for any length of time? Although the vaccine thing doesn’t seem quite right, perhaps he’s banned because of vCJD? I know I am. I like to joke that I might be a mad cow and not know it, and then headbutt people while saying “moo”.
I dunno - I don’t mind telling people why I don’t donate.