Madam, - Recent discussions of the shortage of blood stocks for hospitals have overlooked the restrictions imposed upon willing donors.
Until 2002 I routinely gave blood in the UK as a "platelet" donor. This entails a donation of "spun" plasma which can be undertaken every two weeks (I should add that I have a rare blood group). Upon taking up residence in Cork I attempted to begin donations here but was refused because I had lived in the UK after 1985. This exclusion might well apply to the greater part of the Irish population if one were to include holidays and visits to relatives.
I was informed that the UK restriction related to the "risk" that I might have contracted new-variant CJD from infected beef and that if I passed it on this could possibly lead to another compensation saga. God forbid that I should put the State to such massive expense, but if the risk of blood-borne CJD was so high it would have become obvious in the UK by now. One also wonders if the restriction also applies to the US and certain European countries where BSE is becoming endemic.
If this horrible disease represented a serious cross-infection risk then one might have expected scores of thousands of cases a year to have developed after a 20-year incubation period. Instead the rate of new cases in the UK seems to remain doggedly low, hardly venturing out of single figures annually. This level of infectivity would probably put the risk to Irish patients from former UK-resident blood donors at less than one case every two years, if any. How many Irish citizens are at risk of dying because of the lack of blood? It is clearly a substantially larger number.
How can it be that a largely imaginary threat with an extremely low level of incidence can be taken as more important than a clear and present danger to hundreds if not thousands of Irish people? Perhaps if those who suffer from a lack of available blood for their treatment were successfully to sue the Government, we might expect to see a rapid change in this hysterical pseudo-clinical policy. - Yours, etc,
JIM CORBETT, Montenotte, Cork.
Madam, - Your Health Supplement of June 14th highlighted the low stocks of blood in this country and the need for an increase in the numbers of donors and the frequency of donations. It may interest your readers to know that every day a ready supply of this valuable commodity is routinely wasted.
Sufferers of haemochromatosis (a condition that results in the human body retaining too much iron) receive a treatment called "venesection" to manage their iron levels. This involves the frequent taking of a unit of blood, which is then disposed of. Although there is nothing medically wrong with this blood - indeed it is an excellent supply of iron-rich blood - it is wasted and the patients are precluded from donating to the Blood Transfusion Board.
As a person with this condition, I have watched as over 20 units of my blood have been squandered in the past three years, which is all the more frustrating when I hear that surgical operations have to be curtailed as a result of low blood stocks. Surely this daily waste cannot be allowed to continue. - Yours, etc,
AIDAN DONNELLY, Baldoyle, Dublin 13.