AEGiS-AP: AIDS test imperils blood supply, doctors say; Health officials fear false results will scare donors

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1985. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

AIDS test imperils blood supply, doctors say; Health officials fear false results will scare donors

Associated Press - Thursday, May 2, 1985

BOSTON - A new AIDS test will falsely suggest that thousands of healthy blood donors have the fatal disease, and this inaccuracy could scare away donors unless blood banks double-check results before releasing them, public health officials warn.

The test is intended to screen out donated blood that is contaminated with the AIDS virus so the disease will not be spread through transfusions. Even though the test is highly sensitive, it sometimes labels clean blood as being contaminated.

In fact, the officials say, well over half of the results suggesting the presence of AIDS will be mistakes, or so-called "false positives." However, the U.S. Public Health Service recommends that blood banks notify donors with positive test results that they might have AIDS.

Dr. Michael Osterholm, state epidemiologist in Minnesota, said fear of receiving these mistaken results would keep many people from donating blood.

"This decrease in the donor pool could result in potential life-threatening shortages of blood and plasma," Osterholm wrote. "In Minneapolis and other states where there have been no confirmed cases of transfusion-associated AIDS, such shortages pose a much more serious problem than the risk of transfusion-associated AIDS."

An American Red Cross official said donors will not be told of AIDS-positive results unless they are confirmed by another test.

Osterholm's report was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The test is designed to detect past exposure to HTLV-3, the suspected AIDS virus. But it does not diagnose AIDS itself.

A survey by The Associated Press, covering two dozen blood banks and a 23-bank nationwide system, found results that generally resemble what the American Red Cross found nationally in its first 100,000 units tested: two to three units per thousand with evidence of contamination.
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