Commentary on: Effectiveness of confidential unit exclusion option in blood transfusion services needs re-evaluation

Abstract

In a recent paper,OmidKhoda and colleagues evaluated the efficiency of confidential unit exclusion (CUE) in improving blood safety in Iran’s blood-transfusion system (1). This paper reported a significantly higher risk of HBV and HCV markers in donors who use CUE option to prevent their donated blood from being used. Therefore, the authors concluded that CUE is an effective option for identifying donors with increased risk of HBV and HCV infection. Although there is a general consensus that a carful medical history is the most effective way to identify donors with a high risk of viral contamination, since 1990s some blood-transfusion services worldwide have introduced the CUE option as a measure to further reduce the risk of HBV and HCV infection to the recipients. Because many high-risk behaviors that lead to an increased risk of infection with hepatitis or HIV are related to the sexual behavior of donors, providing a confidential option for high-risk donors to discard their doc 2011 Kowsar M.P.Co. All rights reserved. Please cite this paper as: Cheraghali AM. Effectiveness of confidential unit exclusion option in blood transfusion services needs re-evaluation. Hepat Mon. 2011;11(4):295-8. Implication for health policy/practice/research/medical education: Despite current use of CUE in some of the blood transfusion services worldwide, recent reports have questioned its efficacy on improving blood safety profile in these countries. Therefore, it is highly recommended that countries such as Iran should reevaluate benefits of use of this method versus its disadvantages in their national blood transfusion service.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.