The Associated Press - 27 Dec 1995; 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.
Daniel Q. Haney, The Associated Press Staff Writer

Experts already knew that the risk of catching AIDS from a transfusion is vanishingly small. But the new study shows it is only about half as great as previously estimated.

Nevertheless, the Food and Drug Administration recently recommended that an additional test be performed on donated blood to make it safer still.

The newest analysis, conducted by Dr. Eve M. Lackritz and others from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was based on a review of 9 million donations in 1992 and 1993. It was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

People infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, make antibodies that circulate in their blood. Blood banks routinely test donated blood and throw away any that contains AIDS antibodies. However, the body does not produce the antibodies during the first few weeks of an AIDS infection.

The CDC estimates that one of every 360,000 donations is made during this window when tainted blood can slip through. Even so, as much as 42 percent of this blood is discarded because it fails to pass other kinds of tests. This means that between one in 450,000 and one in 660,000 screened donations contains HIV.

Donations are split up, so each produces an average of 1.8 transfusions. The average recipient receives blood from 5.4 different donors. So the risk that a patient getting blood will catch HIV is between one in 83,000 and one in 122,000.

Most will never get AIDS. Between one-quarter and one-half of transfusion patients die of something else within a year -- long before they get sick from their HIV infection.

The researchers said the risk of AIDS from transfusions has fallen for several reasons. Those include better tests, which shorten the window during which infection escapes detection, as well as a drop in donations from infected people.

The FDA has recommended that blood banks add another test that would search directly for an HIV protein. The CDC study said this extra screening would remove four to six units of infected pints of blood from the nation's supply each year.

Tennis great Arthur Ashe, who died of AIDS complications in 1993, said he got the infection from a transfusion during heart surgery in 1983, before blood was screened for AIDS antibodies.

Copyright 1995/The Associated Press. Reproduced with permission. Reproduction of this article (other than one copy for personal reference) must be cleared through the Permissions Desk, The Associated Press, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.

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