Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1988. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
The Associated Press; Friday, February 26, 1988
The researchers emphasize that despite this "remote but real risk," people who need transfusions should not be deterred from receiving them.
"The blood supply is relatively safe, dramatically safer than it was before we had any screening," said the chief author of the report, Dr. John Ward of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
According to the estimate, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, up to 460 Americans may get AIDS infections each year from transfusions of tainted blood that slip through blood bank screening programs. By comparison, 7,200 people are thought to have gotten the virus from transfusions in 1984, the year before screening began.
The screening tests check blood for antibodies that the body makes in an unsuccessful effort to fight off the AIDS virus. However, in the first few weeks after an AIDS infection, antibody levels are very low or absent. As a result, blood given during this period appears to be safe, even though it contains HIV, the AIDS virus.
The researchers believe that most infected blood that gets through the screening program is donated during recent infections before antibodies have developed.
"This doesn't mean the blood supply is not being adequately protected, but it means we may be able to make a good system better," said Ward.
New, more sensitive screening tests are becoming available. Ward said they should be evaluated to see if they can shorten the period during which newly infected people have undetectable AIDS antibodies. Homosexual men and others at high risk of AIDS infection are asked not to donate blood. To help reduce the risk of blood contamination even further, it's important to find more effective ways of discouraging such people from giving blood, Ward said.
Among the infected donors uncovered by the study were a homosexual man who wanted to learn whether he was infected and a bisexual man who said he felt pressured to give blood at work.
In general, blood banks discourage donations by any man who has had a homosexual encounter since 1977; needle drug abusers and their sexual partners; female sexual partners of bisexual men; immigrants from Haiti or central African countries; and men who have had sex with prostitutes since 1977.
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