By the end of this week, entire blood banks in the continental USA must start testing donated blood for contamination with the Zika infection. Several banks are doing so already, and the early outcomes demonstrate that the country has dodged a bullet — for now. Screenings in a dozen states recommends that infections of Zika virus remain exceedingly rare. Among the nearly 800,000 blood donations tested in the past 6 months or so, about forty were previously positive for the virus.
“It is great news that we are ignoring the transmission of Zika,” stated Dr. Susan Rossmann, the chief medical officer at Gulf Coast Regional Blood Center in Houston.
Still, she pointed out, it might not be surprising there are so few potential positive cases, because blood banks have been dissuading individuals from donating if they recently traveled to a place in which the virus is circulating.
Blood donations screening for Zika infection is performed with tests made by Roche Molecular Systems or by collaboration between 2 medical companies, Hologic Inc. and Grifols.
The screening attempt is regulated as 2 gigantic clinical trials in which every blood donor is enrolled as a participant. All the outcomes, hence, are reported to the companies.
By the day of Friday, Roche’s machines had screened 475,000 donations in the US, excluding Puerto Rico. Merely 25 have been “initially reactive” for Zika virus, claimed Tony Hardiman, who leads the blood screening program of the company.
“Compared to Puerto Rico, it is tiny,” he stated.
Almost, 1% of the blood donors in Puerto Rico were infected by the month of July, with 1.8% of them testing initially positive in the previous week of surveillance, in accordance to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
By the month of mid-October, approximately 348,000 donations had been screened utilizing the test made by Hologic Inc. and Grifols. 14 were initially positive for the Zika virus.
It might be that not all of these samples are really contaminated. The technology is still in development, and the manufacturers are scrambling to confirm their results with further examinations of the donors.
Viral material traced after forty days is unlikely to be live virus, stated Dr. David O. Freedman, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Florida is the mere state with documented regional transmission of the virus. In the month of July, the F.D.A. temporarily halted collection of blood donations in the Miami-Dade and Broward Counties until screening for the Zika infection could be put in place.
Blood banks had been inquiring donors about their travel history and that of their sexual partners, and then inquiring them to postpone donating for almost a month.
The Community Blood Bank of Northwest Pennsylvania and Western New York, based in Erie, Pa., has been drawing additional tubes of blood from donors to fly overnight to a place of Houston laboratory for Zika infection screening at $6 to $10 a sample.
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