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FRIDAY, Oct. 29 (HealthDayNews) -- Routine screening for viral RNA in blood samples from tissue and organ donors could help reduce the risk of transmission of viral diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C, says a study in this week's issue of The Lancet.
Checking for the presence of blood antibodies to these viral diseases is the conventional way of determining whether a person is a safe tissue or organ donor. But this method has drawbacks. For example, some infected donors may not be seroconverted -- even though they're infected, they don't yet show a full immune response to viral infection by producing antibodies.
In this study, French researchers examined whether nucleic acid testing (NAT) could detect HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) RNA. The study included 2,236 organ donors, 636 tissue donors, and 177 cornea donors.
Using NAT, the researchers identified five HCV RNA-positive donors in 2,119 HCV-seronegative organ donors and one HCV RNA-positive donor in 631 HCV-seronegative tissue donors. They did not find any HIV RNA-positive donors.
"Our data, together with reported cases of HCV transmission to recipients from a seronegative HCV RNA-positive donor, suggest that routine NAT screening of organ and tissue donors might increase viral safety in the transplantation setting," researcher Jean-Michel Pawlotsky said in a prepared statement.
"Implementation of systematic NAT screening of tissue (and cell) donors is highly feasible because viral testing can be done every day and can be based on standardized, partly automated, commercial techniques and procedures," Pawlotsky said.
More information
The United Network for Organ Sharing has more about organ transplantation (www.transplantliving.org ).
-- Robert Preidt
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