Retrospective audit of blood donation at a Hospital-based blood centre: Implications for blood product supply and safety

An audit of blood donation at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) was performed between January 1995 and December 1998. During these four years, 21,733 persons attended the blood collection centre and 6,711 (30.8 percent) were rejected as donors. Females accounted for 3, 054 (45.6 percent) of rejected donors while 3,647 (54.4 percent) were males. Females were rejected primarily because of low haemoglobin levels, while rejection was most frequently attributed to symptoms of the common cold and recent drug use. One hunderd and two rejected donors (1.5 percent) admitted to recent treatment of a sexually transmitted disease, and 138 (2.0 percent) presented within 16 weeks of a prior donation. Of 15,022 units donated, altruistic voluntary donations accounted for 307 (2 percent) and 53 (0.3 percent) were autologous donations. Seven hundred and four units (4.6 percent) were discarded because of positivity on initial testing for a marker of transmissible infection. Overall prevalence for markers of infection was 2.5 eprcent for HTLV-1, 0.9 percent for Hepatitis B and 0.4 percent for HIV I/II. Donations at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) collection centre contributed 15.8 percent of the national blood supply for the period under study.

Lymphocyte immunophenotype reference ranges in healthy Thai adults: implications for management of HIV/AIDS in Thailand.

Lymphocyte immunophenotype reference ranges for T, B, and NK subsets were determined for healthy adult Thais in a multi-center study in Bangkok. Immunophenotyping was by flow cytometry using lysed whole blood. A standard protocol for flow cytometry instrumentation, reagents and quality control was used to minimize site differences and to facilitate comparison of the Thai reference values to those found for Caucasians in previous studies. Major differences were determined for CD3(T), CD4 (T helper/inducer) and CD16+56 (NK) lymphocyte percentages and CD4 lymphocyte absolute counts. Age trends and sex differences were also observed. Compared to Caucasians, Thais, particularly Thai males, had lower CD3 and CD4 T lymphocyte percentages and absolute numbers whereas the percentage of NK lymphocytes was higher. Heterogeneity attributed to biological variation of CD4 T lymphocyte but not other immunophenotype subset distributions was also observed in a well defined geographic population. This study demonstrates the importance of ethnicity, age, sex and possibly environment as factors that influence distribution characteristics of normal lymphocyte immunophenotype reference values. These observations have important implications for the use of lymphocyte subsets-particularly CD3+ CD4+ T lymphocyte measurements as applied to HIV disease staging, AIDS definition and the overall clinical management of HIV/AIDS in Thailand.