Oct 22, 2010 3:57 pm US/Mountain
CDC: Donated HIV-Tainted Blood Infects Colo. Man
JIM SUHR, Associated Press Writer
ST. LOUIS (AP) ― Blood products from a Missouri donor infected a Colorado kidney-transplant patient in 2008 with the virus that causes AIDS, marking the nation's only recorded case of HIV transmission from a blood transfusion in the past eight years, according to a federal report published Friday.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's report stressed that although tests scientifically confirmed the donor's link to the Colorado patient's HIV after that recipient's August 2008 transplant, getting the virus from blood transfusions remains exceedingly rare. The CDC also noted that the donor didn't reveal high-risk sexual behavior to health care workers who questioned him before he gave blood and that his own infection was too new to be detected at the time of his first donation.
The questioned donor's blood product — packed red blood cells — from the first of his two 2008 donations also was given to an Arkansas patient who died of heart disease two days after a transfusion during a mid-2008 surgery, though it's unknown if that patient ended up contracting HIV, the report said.
The report, published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, did not identify the Missouri blood center and described the questioned donor only as being in his 40s.
The report noted his positive HIV status was not confirmed until November 2008 after he donated blood a second time. The tainted blood from that donation was destroyed, and the man was indefinitely barred from additional donations, the report said.
Before both donations, the man insisted to health care workers that he had no HIV risk factors. But he later acknowledged in a follow-up interview with state health investigators that he was married and had sometimes had anonymous, drunken sex with men and women before his first donation.
Men who have had homosexual sex have been banned for decades from donating blood — a prohibition upheld in June by the Obama Administration's Health and Human Services Department despite some lawmakers' efforts to have it lifted.
Transmission of HIV through blood transfusion was documented in the U.S. in the early 1980s. Since then, the CDC said, the risk has been almost eliminated through questionnaires to exclude donors at higher risk for HIV infection and the use of ultra-sensitive laboratory screening to identify infected blood donations.
Still, the CDC said, health investigators found that the Missouri donor contributed blood the first time during a window before early HIV infection can be detected though screening — a so-called "eclipse" period estimated to be nine days, based on limited data. That blood at the time evaded HIV surveillance and tested negative for the virus, though plasma from it later was proven to have infected the Colorado kidney patient.
"Even the most sensitive screening technologies currently available cannot identify the presence of HIV infection during the first few days after infection," according to the report, saying the onus is on blood donors to accurately answer eligibility screening questions about their sexual history "to ensure the safest blood supply possible."
After the Missouri man's second 2008 blood donation tested positive for HIV, the CDC said, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services was notified in December 2008. The donor turned away repeated contacts by the department before agreeing to a brief interview in April of last year, when an oral test confirmed the HIV virus.
http://cbs4denver.com/wireapnewsco/CDC.Mo.donor.2.1975778.html
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