The Patient's Blood is the Safest Blood

Abstract

Transfusion medicine has entered a new phase marked by renewed consideration of the risks of disease transmitted by transfusion. Public concern about the safety of transfusion was aroused by the discovery that the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) can be transmitted by blood transfusion.¹ The focus of early AIDS-control measures on making the national blood resource safer heightened public fears about transfusion-transmitted AIDS.² Periodic reminders, such as the current "look back" for patients who received transfusions of blood later suspected to have been contaminated by the AIDS virus, have sustained those fears.³ Patients who require transfusion are now apprehensive to the . . .