So about six months back, I gave blood at the Bonfils blood drive at the office. Huzzah for me, and way to get beyond your visceral repulsion of needles, Dave! Still, nothing I’ve not done before.
A few weeks later, I got an interesting letter, which is stashed away somewhere, but basically it said:
Don’t worry — it turns out you don’t have HIV after all.
Gah!
It turns out the initial testing of my donation had shown a positive. They didn’t mention that, but did a mandatory (and more thorough) retesting that showed me as clear. Which is when they told me about it.
There was then various legal disclaimers and so forth, and that it was my responsibility (not theirs) if I wanted further testing. Since I am as close as you can get to Zero Risk for HIV infection as you can get, I was not terribly worried.
There was a further note that said, “Hey, by the way, even though you’re clean, you can’t donate for six months.”
Which, of course, makes no sense. Granted, the logistics of testing and retesting make it unlikely they could actually use the blood I’d donated last time, but why wait for six months before letting me donate again?
Well, a few days back I got a call from Bonfils congratulating me on living another six months, and asking if I’d traveled to some HIV-prone places or done some things that might have infected me. Um, no. Great, we’ll end you further info. And so, yesterday, I got a further email, which said,
You are now eligible for testing to reenter the blood donor program and we encourage you to do so.
Right. Basically, to give blood, I have to be tested. To be tested, I can either go to a Bonfils blood center (which, frankly, there’s one I walk past downtown), or I can wait to the next time they visit my office.
Hrm.
Okay, I guess I can do that. I’m still irked that a mistake on their part, recognized as such, has suddenly put me on the Do Not Donate list. It may well be a legal restriction, but it’s still an annoying presumption of “guilt” that I have to prove otherwise. Not quite as annoying as being of a group that is permanently deferred, I suppose, but still, for being someone who wants to help, even at some level of personal discomfort, not being allowed to is irksome.
Is this post unfinished? It ends with “Well, today” following some extra spacing. Did something happen today?
No, it was finished but something I’d written during the draft never got deleted (sigh). Cleaned and updated.
I am permanently unwanted – they found some protein in my blood that they didn’t like. But false positives on HIV and other diseases are quite likely even if the tests are conducted correctly..
Going to second george.w’s comment on false positives to a point — it’s not so much that they’re ‘quite likely’, as that, if a test for a rare condition comes back positive, it’s extremely likely to be a false positive. (Leonard Mlodinow has a great explanation of this in his book “The Drunkard’s Walk”; check it out from the local library if you get a chance.)
I also wouldn’t be too hard on the blood bank — for starters, false positives can be the result of error, but they’re also basically expected. Given a large volume of tests, some of them will have flaws that produce a false positive (or worse, a false negative). The problem is that the policies adopted for keeping HIV out of the blood supply don’t consider whether a given positive result is expected to be false or not — after all, the same math that can show that you’ve got a 98% or better chance not to have AIDS if your initial test result comes back positive can show that there’s a small but not impossible chance that the other tests could be false negatives.
Despite the need for blood donors, I think telling 100,000 donors to take 6 months off is a pretty small price to pay to avoid having someone inadvertently infected with AIDS from a blood transfusion (which still, even with these precautions, happens extremely rarely).
Lastly, having worked at a place where plasma is collected, I can say that all such places have a policy that they’d prefer you not donate if your goal is to receive an AIDS test as part of the donation — again, it’s a policy to try to avoid introducing the disease in the blood supply, and people who are truly concerned about whether or not they have AIDS should get a specific test.
Guess that’s just a long-winded way of saying, “Don’t take it personally.”