Abstract

 Background and Objectives

 Blood safety is one of the basic goals of blood centers in the world. Additional screening systems such as self-exclusion and failed are used with routine diagnostic tests to detect transfusion transmitted infections. This study aimed to investigate efficacy of these systems on improvement of blood safety in Sari and Behshahr Blood Centers.

 Materials and Methods

 A retrospective cross-sectional study was carried out using serological data and personal information of donors. The information was obtained from data bank of Sari and Behshahr Blood Centers in 1384. Data analysis was performed using Chi-square test.

 Results

 The blood donations of 255 (1.5%) and 87 (0.5%) donors out of 17036 were excluded by failed and confidential self-exclusion methods, respectively. HBV, HCV and HIV infection percentages among control group, failed, and self-exclusion were 3.04%, 3.9% and 9.2% respectively. The positive ELISA percentages of HBs-Ag, HCV-Ab and HIV-Ab in control group were 0.74%, 1.9% and 0.29% respectively. HBs-Ag and HCV-Ab in failed group rates were 0.4%, 3.5% respectively while HIV-Ab rate was 0. Both HBs-Ag and HCV-Ab were 4.6% in CSE group while HIV-Ab rate was 0.

 Conclusions

 The results indicated that the confidential self-exclusion is an appropriate method to improve blood safety. It has also revealed that it could be possible to exclude infected donors during incubation period.

 Key words : Blood donor, HIV, HBs-Ag, HCV-Ab