Effectiveness of confidential unit exclusion in screening blood donors of the regional blood bank in Londrina, Paraná State

• Autor(a) principal: Vogler,Ingridt Hildegard
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Saito,Mariza, Spinosa,Adriana Aparecida, Silva,Marilza Celina da, Munhoz,Egberto, Reiche,Edna Maria Vissoci
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Revista brasileira de hematologia e hemoterapia (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-84842011000500010
• topic: Donor selection; Serologic tests; Diagnosis; Blood transfusion

BACKGROUND: For transfusion purposes, blood donors must be accepted both in clinical and serological evaluations and must not have excluded their own donation using the confidential unit exclusion. AIMS: The objective of this study was to verify whether blood donors who choose self exclusion are more likely to be positive in serological tests than donors who do not. METHODS: A cross-sectional analysis was carried out of 51,861 consecutive whole blood donations from January 2004 to December 2008 at a public blood bank in Londrina, Southern Brazil. RESULTS: Self exclusion was chosen in 1672 (3.2%) donations, most frequently by first-time blood donors (p-value < 0.0001), by blood donors from external collections (p-value < 0.0001), by men (p value < 0.0001) and by under 30-year-old donors (p-value < 0.0001). The frequency of positive serology was 5.3% in the group that chose self exclusion and 3.5% in the group that did not choose self exclusion (p-value < 0.0001). CONCLUSIONS: These results show that confidential unit exclusion used in this blood bank is effective and is inexpensive. However, the diagnostic power to detect blood-borne infections was low and resulted in the discard of a high number of blood bags without any direct or indirect serologic markers of pathogens. The use of confidential unit exclusion could be replaced with molecular tests to screen blood donors.