Re: Barb - blood transfusion and occult pathogens

[Guest guest]

This is harder to study than I thought. Organ recipients take

immunosuppressives for life - that is a big complicating factor in

studying their health, and no control group exists.

Blood transfusion recipients are evidently extremely unhealthy on

average, making it hard to assess whether they might have contracted

an idiopathic inflammopathy via transfusion. PMID 14996196 (2004):

" The only survival and mortality data on a general population of

transfused patients in the United States is more than two decades

old " , spurring this new study.

" Overall annual mortality was 31 percent in Year 1 after transfusion,

14 percent in Year 2, and 10 percent in each of Years 3 through 5. "

I can only think of one way to study the question. Look at young

healthies recieving transfusion due to injuries such as car accident.

Compare health over the next 10-30 years that with controls who were

similarly healthy at the time of similar severe accidents but didnt

quite need a transfusion.

Oh, arent there also people with nothing wrong with them except they

need to be infused with platelets all the time? There is no control

group for these subjects but it still might be interesting.

Obviously, tho, unless it one day becomes crystal clear that

idiopathic inflammopathies are caused by microbes, any finding such a

study might make would probably be considered erroneous/non-causal by

many readers, unless the difference uncovered was very very large.