Topic: Red Cross doing blood work using volunteer army of donors
Melanie Reber
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 3707
posted
Published: Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Red Cross doing blood work using volunteer army of donors
Let's see: The global economy is collapsing, climate change is accelerating, my TV will become useless next month and I've got a hangnail.
Hoo, boy; let's talk about something fun for a change. How about disease-carrying deer ticks!
Actually, it isn't the ticks or the disease they transmit (babesiosis, in this case, not Lyme disease) that interests me. Rather, it's the way the Red Cross is using the vast volunteer army of blood donors to hunt down an elusive ailment and see how much of a problem it is.
In buzzword terms, you could call this the crowdsourcing of epidemiology.
I encountered this the last time our family gave blood, when the paperwork for donors included an announcement it would be tested for a protozoan parasite called babesia, which cause a disease called babesiosis.
(Pause for public service announcement: If you're a healthy adult and don't donate blood at least once a year, shame on you. It's easy, just painful enough to make you feel virtuous and serves a real need. Call the Red Cross right now and find the nearest blood drive; no excuses.)
My wife, a veterinarian who deals with tick-borne diseases all the time, noticed the notice and wanted to know more.
So I talked to David Leiby, head of the transmissible disease department for the American Red Cross, who designed the study.
Babesiosis, it turns out, isn't too dangerous, although it can produce harmful, malaria-like symptoms in the young, the old and those with weak immune systems. Most people who get infected show no signs at all.
Babesiosis has long been endemic in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Long Island, and there are anecdotes about it creeping north past Cape Cod into New Hampshire, particularly near the coast.
But most people who are infected don't show any symptoms, so it's hard to say for sure where it is.
"If I go to the (Centers for Disease Control & Prevention) and say, 'Where is babesia and how often does it occur in New Hampshire?' they don't really know," Leiby said. "Sometimes, with emerging diseases like this, the only recourse is to do the study ourselves."
Why does the Red Cross care? Because, Leiby explained, "sometimes this agent (the parasite) gets transmitted by blood transmission."
(Surprisingly, a lot of diseases can't be passed on via blood transmission - including Lyme disease.)
If the babesia parasite is common, then the Red Cross will have to start screening all blood supplies for the protozoa, adding it to the seven or eight other things it screens for.
Screening is time-consuming and expensive, however, and first they need to see if it's a real problem. So, they're using blood donors to conduct a study of how many people are infected or who have antibodies showing they were infected in the past.
You could hardly ask for a better medical survey. Instead of getting people to answer a questionnaire, the highly suspect basis for much of public health's decision-making, you get actual medical data from people's blood.
It isn't a random population sample, but it's pretty darn close, and while it has issues (if I have antibodies in my blood, was I exposed in New Hampshire or when I visited Nantucket?), it's still pretty darn good.
"A lot of our studies start out as epidemiology, to determine the extent, transmission, spread of disease. Then we assess that data, determine if it is a threat to blood supply," Leiby said.
A similar survey process in the past led the Red Cross to screen all blood donations for Charga's disease.
Leiby said the Red Cross has been doing babesia surveys around Connecticut for several years, but the possibility of a spread has moved the issue up on the priority list.
The study only just began in New Hampshire.
"We don't know what we're going to find," he said, so it isn't clear what action the Red Cross will take. One possibility is that blood supplies would be screened for babesiosis only in the Northeast, the nation's "epicenter" for the disease. If so, that would be the first time the Red Cross does blood screening regionally, rather than nationally.
It will probably take at least a year before any conclusions are reached, but in the meantime, we all have a chance to add a little bit to the nation's knowledge of its health-care picture.
In other words: Go donate some blood, will you? Granite Geek runs every Wednesday and as a frequently updated blog at www.granitegeek.org. David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or [email protected].
posted
Is there any screaning for the other tick bourne co-infections in the blood donations?
I was asked to give blood last weekend at church. When I told them I couldn't...after the shock on their faces from me saying no, I said I didn't have AIDS...but I do have Lyme disease and many co-infections. They said that they can take blood from poeple that had been infected with lyme disease. (they think it goes away?) I was in shock! so I believe the blood supply is definately tainted, and I would never want anyone elses infections. At least I know what I already have. And no, I will not pass it to you by donating blood!
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