Blood-Vital for Life! - THE NEXT SHOE? OR SHOES?

Many apartment dwellers have heard the thump of one shoe hitting the floor above them; the may then get tense awaiting for the second.  In the blood dilemma, no one knows how many deadly shoes may still hit.

The AIDS virus was designated HIV, but some experts now call it HIV-1.  Why?  
Because they found another virus of the AIDS (HIV-2). It can cause AIDS symptoms and is widespread in some areas. Moreover, it "is not consistently detected by AIDS tests now in use here," reports the New York Times.  (June 7, 1989) "The new findings . . . make it more difficult for blood banks to be sure a donation is safe."

Or what of distant relatives to the AIDS virus?  A presidential commission (U.S.A.) said that one such virus "is believed to be the cause of adult T-cell leukemia/lymphoma and a severe neurological disease."  This virus is already in the blood donor populations and can be spread in blood. People have a right to wonder, 'How effective is the blood-bank screening for such other viruses?' 

Really, only time will tell how many blood-borne viruses are lurking in the blood supply. "The unknown may be more cause for concern than the known," writes Dr. Harold T. Meryman.  "Transmissible viruses with incubation times measured in many years will be difficult to associate with  transfusions and even more difficult to detect.  The HTLV group is surely the first of these to surface."  (Transfusion Medicine Reviews, July 1989) "As if the AIDS epidemic were not misery enough, . . . a number of newly proposed or described risks of transfusion  have drawn attention during the 1980's. It does not require great imagination to predict the other serious viral diseases exist and are transmitted by homologous transfusions" -Living Homologous Exposure Alternative Strategies, 1989. 

So many "shoes" have already dropped that the Centers for Disease Control recommends  "universal precautions."  That is, 'health-care workers should assume that all patients are infectious for HIV and other blood-borne pathogens.'  With good reason, health-care workers and members of the public are reassessing their view of blood. 

We cannot assume that all blood is yet being tested.  For example, it is reported that by the start of 1989, about 80 percent of Brazil's blood banks were not under government control, nor were they testing for AIDS. 

Next time: Quality Alternatives to Transfusion

From the jw.org publications