Camp rivalry blamed for contaminated blood stocks

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Camp rivalry blamed for bad blood stocks

Death taint in gift of life - Amit Ukil

The Telegraph March 13, 2002

A " competitive trend " among neighbourhood clubs and police stations in the city

to draw a greater number of blood donors at voluntary camps has left the door

open for 'bad blood' to enter blood banks.

In a bid to draw crowds to the camps, quite a few of the organiser are offering

incentives, like bags and wall clocks, to the donors after they gift the 300 ml

that each unit comprises.

Debabrata Ray, a senior member of the Association of Voluntary Blood Donors,

West Bengal, which has spearheaded the NGO role in the state's blood donation

movement, labels this an alarming trend. " Other than Rs 10 worth of nourishment,

a donor card and a badge, a person should not be given any incentive to donate

blood, " he says. " We have urged officials at the Central Blood Bank to ensure

that camp organiser do not encourage incentives for donors. "

The practice can give rise to two problems. One, the rush of donors forces the

technicians and volunteers attending the camps to overlook the mandatory

procedure of asking the donor whether he has been involved in " risky " behaviour

in a two-month period preceding the donation. Two, the gifts lure more

low-income group people to the camps.

Sociologists and NGOs point out that the likelihood of an HIV or a Hepatitis B

or C infection is more among this group than among the middle and higher-income

groups, who are apparently more aware of how viruses spread. " A number of clubs

and police stations offer gifts which draw people who are more likely to have an

infection, " says D. Ashis, secretary of Medical Bank.

Finding at the Calcutta School of Tropical Medicine corroborate this. " The

majority of HIV detections so far have been among people from low to

lower-middle income groups, " a counsellor at the school pointed out. It was to

avoid this risk that West Bengal become the first state in the country to ban

professional blood donors.

These incorrect practices are leading to the collection of potentially infected

blood by banks, which are tranfused to patients later. The report that 20

children requiring frequent transfusion have been detected with HIV, an increase

from eight about six months earlier, has caused concern and raised several

questions.

Blood banks, both government and private, vouch that they are strictly following

the 1995 Supreme Court orders on screening and storing of blood.

Then how are the viruses getting past the tests, which are " 99 per cent accurate

and carried out according to the stipulated guidelines? "

" Zero risk transfusion is non-existent throughout the world, no matter how

advanced the techniques are or how much a country may be spending on the test, "

points out a senior haematologist at Calcutta Medical College and Hospital.

" Good blood turning out to be bad is mainly due to the window period that a

donated unit goes through. If a person unknowingly infected with a hepatitis

virus or HIV today donates blood any day eight weeks hence, the ELISA and spot

tests that blood banks carry out will miss detecting whether the unit is

infected or not. This is because it takes that much time for the antibodies to

develop in the blood. "

The blood units, along with the " dormant " virus, thus get past the lab screening

that the banks carry out. Experts have known about the possibility of

window-period blood collection. One way out is adopting more efficient but

extremely costly techniques that detect an infection earlier, reducing the

window period to 10 days. But the P-24 antigen test costs about Rs 2,000 per

sample, while a polymerised chain reaction (PCR) test is as much as Rs 22,000.

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Dr.Jagdish Harsh ( jharsh@... )

Director of Administration and Operations

François-Xavier Bagnoud (INDIA) ( www.fxb.org )

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