NEW YORK, Feb 10 (Reuters Health) -- The risk of acquiring an infection from a blood transfusion is lower than ever before, according to a report in Thursday's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
"We now understand that 15 or 20 years ago, the risk of getting HIV-infected blood was nearly 1 in 100 in some communities," said lead author Dr. Lawrence Goodnough, of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. "Today, the risk of HIV transmission is somewhere between 1 in 600,000 and one in a million, and... new tests coming along in the next year or two... will reduce this risk by another 50%."
The risk of contracting other communicable diseases from a transfusion has also decreased, according to the report, which calls the nation's blood supply "very safe."
"The estimated risk of transfusion-transmitted hepatitis C virus is now 1 in 103,000 transfusions," according to the report. And hepatitis A "has been estimated to occur in the case of 1 in 1 million units."
The use of blood transfusions has also decreased, in part due to concern about the safety of the blood supply. Ten million units of blood were transfused in 1980, 12.2 million units in 1986, and 11.4 million units in 1987.
"Techniques or strategies to avoid blood transfusion will no longer be driven by the known risks of death from blood transfusion, since they are now so low that no alternative is currently as safe as a blood transfusion," conclude the researchers. "Instead, blood conservation will be driven more by issues related to the costs and inventory of blood."
SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine 1999;340:438-447.
