MUMBAI, January 2: One out of every five hundred bottles of voluntarily donated blood, screened for HIV and marked safe, can give you AIDS. This shocking revelation made in a study conducted recently is likely to pose fresh problems for the state health department, which is struggling to comply with the Supreme Court's ban on professional blood donors.The study, a joint effort of the Aids Research and Control Centre (ARCON), J J Hospital and the Directorate of Health Services, has revealed that one out of every 500 bottles of voluntarily donated blood in Mumbai was HIV infected. This fact came to light when samples which had tested negative in the ELISA test were put through the Reverse-Transcriptase-Polymersase-Chain-Reaction (RTPCR) test. A person tests HIV positive in the ELISA anti-body test only three months after infection. However In this three-month window period the risk of the infection spreading is high. There are three categories of blood donors: The highest risk category is that of the
professional donors who, the Supreme Court has directed, should be identified by blood banks and checked. The second category is replacement donors who are usually considered safe because they are the relatives and friends of patients.
But, with professional donors masquerading as replacement donors, the risks cannot be eliminated. The safest category is considered to be that of the voluntary donors.
However if, as the ARCON study says, one in 500 bottles of blood is HIV infected then taking the base figure of one lakh transfusion per year, it can be calculated that about 200 individuals could contract HIV through blood transfusion this year alone from these `safe' donors. ``There is a great risk of AIDS spreading through blood transfusions. The infection spreads fast and a lot of infected individuals are sero-negative (infected by HIV, but do not test positive in the anti-body test),'' Dr Subhash Hira, the director of ARCON, said. The solution he offers is to put all HIV negative blood through the P24
antigen ELISA test at an additional cost of Rs 30 per sample. In this test, the virus is detected just five to seven days after infection.
Another solution is to be a lot more circumspect while prescribing blood transfusion to patients. ``A lot of doctors advise blood transfusion in cases of dehydration or anaemia. This should be stopped. Blood transfusion should be resorted to only when absolutely essential,'' Dr Hira said. What now worries the experts is that after the ban on professional donors, the demand for volunteers will only go up. At a meeting on December 23, all state health officers in charge of blood donation drive were told that they would soon have to fix new targets for voluntary blood collection. The aim of the state government of course is to ensure surplus blood. But after the study Aids Research and Control Centre no one knows if that is such a good thing.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
