XMRV: Red Cross Now Barring Blood Donors Who Have CFS

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WSJ Health Blog

* December 3, 2010, 9:28 PM ET

XMRV: Red Cross Now Barring Blood Donors Who Have CFS

By Amy Dockser Marcus

The controversy over whether the retrovirus XMRV is linked to chronic

fatigue syndrome has still not been resolved, but the American Red

Cross has just weighed in. The organization said today that as a

result of concerns over XMRV, it is barring people with a diagnosis of

CFS from donating blood.

In a press release here, the Red Cross said that there isn't enough

data yet to determine for sure that XMRV is transmitted through blood

transfusions or that it causes diseases. But " in the interest of

patient and donor safety, " the organization said it was indefinitely

barring blood donations from people with CFS.

HealthBlog wasn't able to reach the Red Cross for comment, but it's

likely that a number of recent events prompted today's announcement.

In June, a task force set up by the AABB, an organization whose

members collect most of the blood in the U.S. and to which the Red

Cross belongs, urged members to discourage people with CFS from

donating blood. More recently, a group of researchers at the FDA, NIH,

and Harvard Medical School published a paper that linked a family of

viruses, to which XMRV belongs, to CFS.

A federally funded task force has been studying whether XMRV poses a

threat to the nation's blood supply since last year, when a paper in

Science first raised the possibility that XMRV was not only linked to

CFS but was also found in the blood of healthy people. Later this

month, the task force is expected to present a report on its work to

an FDA committee that looks at blood safety issues. The FDA is in

charge of regulating the blood supply but yet hasn't changed its

recommendations on donations from people with CFS.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2010/12/03/xmrv-red-cross-now-barring-blood-donors-w\

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