FDA Alters Blood Donor Eligibility Guidelines during COVID-19 Public Health Emergency The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued four blood donor eligibility guidelines on April 2, 2020 to help alleviate… April 7, 2020
Convalescent Plasma May be Beneficial to Treat COVID-19 COVID-19 has been spreading across the globe since December 2019 and is now a pandemic. With no vaccine or approved… March 30, 2020
Blood Use and Supply during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Early Lessons from Seattle Physicians and colleagues from the Transfusion Medicine and Hematology Divisions at the University of Washington in Seattle and the local… March 24, 2020
COVID-19 Pandemic Leading to Blood Supply Shortages The worldwide pandemic of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19 disease (or coronavirus disease 2019), is disrupting every aspect… March 17, 2020
National Survey Finds Stable Adverse Transfusion Reaction Rate in the U.S. The 2017 National Blood Collection and Utilization Survey (NBCUS) used a web-based survey of approximately 3,000 U.S. community-based and hospital-based… March 11, 2020
Risk of Transfusion Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 Is Only Theoretical The novel coronavirus that was first reported in December 2019 from Wuhan, China has been renamed SARS-CoV-2, and causes the… March 4, 2020
Minimal Residual Risk for HIV, Hepatitis B, and Hepatitis C from Blood Products Based on screening results of over 58 million blood donations from the American Red Cross from more than 14.7 million… February 28, 2020
Plasma Exchange Does Not Reduce Risk of Death for Patients with Severe ANCA-Associated Vasculitis The underlying pathology behind antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis is not clear; more effective and safer treatments are needed. High-dose… February 18, 2020
Final FDA Guidance to Reduce Transfusion-Transmitted Human T-Lymphotropic Virus Types I and II Transmission of the retroviruses human T-lymphotropic virus types I and II (HTLV-I/II) require cell-to-cell contact—mother to child transmission, sexual transmission,… February 12, 2020
New Draft Guidance Recommendations from the FDA to Reduce Risk of Transfusion-Transmitted Creutzfeldt-Jakob Diseases Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) is a fatal, rare neurological disease caused by infectious prions, or abnormally folded proteins. Sporadic CJD accounts… February 5, 2020
