Plasma Donation

This is a neat look at how so many people get turned away from blood donation centers because they have been in malaria riden areas. Check out the rest of this great read, I found this while looking for some information on why people just don’t give enough blood, this is one reason why a donor can’t donate. enjoy

Blood banks turn away up to 150,000 would-be donors each year on the slight chance they picked up malaria while traveling to any of dozens of countries. At the same time, concern is growing that a second parasitic infection from abroad – Chagas’ disease, rampant in parts of Latin America – increasingly threatens donated blood.

Both infections are rare here, but there’s no way to test donated blood for either one. Now blood banks are pushing for better safeguards that also could help stretch the nation’s tight supply.

Next week, the Food and Drug Administration opens debate on how to balance the need for blood with Americans’ increasing travel to malaria hot spots, and to urge manufacturers to develop a malaria test to solve the problem.

The vast majority of U.S. travelers return healthy, and there have been only one or two cases of transfusion-spread malaria in five years. But without a blood test, there’s no way to tell who might be unknowingly incubating the mosquito-borne disease.

So FDA requires blood banks to ask about would-be donors’ travels. No donating for a year after a short trip to a malaria-prone country; for three years for anyone who spent more than a year in a malaria-prone country or suffered malaria symptoms.

It doesn’t matter if you faithfully took anti-malaria medicine; you could have forgotten a pill or be one of the unlucky few infected anyway. Even “safe” vacation spots may not be: The Bahamas aren’t normally malaria-prone, but a May outbreak has just put tourists returning from one island, Great Exuma, on the no-donation list, too.

Some 34,000 pints of blood are needed every day, yet only about 5 percent of the Americans eligible to donate do so, and increasing foreign travel is further shrinking that donor pool. The American Red Cross, which collects half the nation’s blood, last year estimated that some of its regions were losing 150 to 200 donations a month because of the malaria risk.

Historically, most cases of transfusion-spread malaria have been traced to immigrants from malaria-prone countries who harbored the parasite despite years with no symptoms. One U.S. manufacturer, Abbott Laboratories, is in the initial stages of designing a malaria test for donated blood.

So does this mean that I can’t donate after my trip to Jamaica? I’ll find out soon because I just got back and have a blood drive coming up real soon.