Pereira Paulo, Westgard James O, Encarnação Pedro, Seghatchian Jerard, de Sousa Gracinda
Department of Quality Assurance, Portuguese Institute of Blood and Transplantation, Avenida Miguel Bombarda 6, 1000-208 Lisboa, Portugal.
Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison, WI, USA.
Transfus Apher Sci. 2015 Apr;52(2):252-5. doi: 10.1016/j.transci.2015.02.015. Epub 2015 Feb 14.
The risk of uncertain results in infectious agents' tests is recognized in blood establishments, being particularly evident during the blood donor selection. The current risk-based approaches require risk assessment and "risk-based thinking". Accordingly, the blood establishment should consider the effect of uncertainty in all the technical decisions taken in a screening laboratory. Since the post-transfusion safety is one of the blood establishments' goals, the risk of post-transfusion infection should be evaluated and actions taken to decrease the chance of blood donations validation use false negative results. This article reviews and discusses the sources of uncertainty of infectious agents' reported results in blood establishments. It describes a set of sources of uncertainty that should be considered in screening immunoassay's decisions. The infectious agents' uncertainty concern is critical for reporting reliable results.
