Transfusion-transmitted infections
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BioMed Central
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Transfusion-transmitted infections Florian Bihl*1, Damiano Castelli2, Francesco Marincola3, Roger Y Dodd4 and Christian Brander1 Address: 1Partners AIDS Research Center, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 2Swiss Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service of Southern Switzerland, Lugano, Switzerland, 3NIH Clinical Center, HLA Typing Laboratory, Bethesda, MD, USA and 4American Red Cross, Holland Laboratory, Rockville, MD, USA Email: Florian Bihl* - [email protected]; Damiano Castelli - [email protected]; Francesco Marincola - [email protected]; Roger Y Dodd - [email protected]; Christian Brander - [email protected] * Corresponding author
Published: 6 June 2007 Journal of Translational Medicine 2007, 5:25
doi:10.1186/1479-5876-5-25
Received: 18 May 2007 Accepted: 6 June 2007
This article is available from: http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/5/1/25 © 2007 Bihl et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract Although the risk of transfusion-transmitted infections today is lower than ever, the supply of safe blood products remains subject to contamination with known and yet to be identified human pathogens. Only continuous improvement and implementation of donor selection, sensitive screening tests and effective inactivation procedures can ensure the elimination, or at least reduction, of the risk of acquiring transfusion transmitted infections. In addition, ongoing education and up-to-date information regarding infectious agents that are potentially transmitted via blood components is necessary to promote the reporting of adverse events, an important component of transfusion transmitted disease surveillance. Thus, the collaboration of all parties involved in transfusion medicine, including national haemovigilance systems, is crucial for protecting a secure blood product supply from known and emerging blood-borne pathogens.
Background Although there are early reports in the history of medicine that describe attempts to treat patients with human or animal blood products, transfusion medicine is a relatively young field that has developed only since the second half of the last century. Very rapidly, however, it became clear that these therapeutic approaches also carried their problems, such as the (in-)compatibility of red blood cells and plasma between donors and recipients, and the possibility of transmitting infectious diseases [1,2]. While in the past, the risk of transfusion-transmitted infections (TTI) was accepted by patients and physicians as unavoidable, a low-risk blood supply is expected today. Since the early nineteen sixties, blood banks, as well as plasma manufacturing industries, have aggressively pursued strategies to reduce the risks of TTI. I
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