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Rebecca Voelker

JAMA. 2000;283:2379.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

A new blood safety initiative in the Americas is aimed at reducing paid blood donations, increasing voluntary donations, and improving screening for infectious agents.

"We want people in the countries to understand and accept blood donation as a desirable, altruistic act," George A. O. Alleyne, MD, director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), said last month as the initiative was launched on World Health Day. Only five nations in the Americas—Aruba, Curaçao, Cuba, Canada, and the United States—have all-voluntary blood donation. Sixteen countries—eight in the Caribbean, six in Latin America, and Canada and the United States—screen all donated blood for HIV and hepatitis B (HBV) and C (HCV) viruses.

Excluding Canada and the United States, 99% of donor blood in the Americas is screened for HIV and HBV, but only 60% is screened for HCV. According to PAHO, those figures translate annually into 50,000 transfused units that . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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