President Thabo Mbeki will receive a private apology from the South African National Blood Service (SANBS) for revealing in the media that the blood he donated had been destroyed.
The SANBS said in a statement on Tuesday the issue of an apology to the president is a private matter, which will be dealt with by its chairperson, Reverend John Pender-Smith.
The Department of Health on Monday slammed the SANBS for revealing that Mbeki’s blood had been rejected because he declined to complete the questionnaire while donating blood at a publicity event.
No further ”discussions” will be held with the media until after the meeting of delegates of the SANBS board with the Department of Health on Saturday, the blood service said.
The organisation has come under fire for the controversial use of race to profile the safety of donated blood.
Black people constitute less than 5% of blood donors in the country’s inland areas, which provide 60% of national supplies, SANBS statistics revealed.
In the Western Cape, the figure is only 2,2%.
This emerged while the board of the SANBS met on Tuesday to thrash out whether it should continue categorising blood from black donors as high risk as part of efforts to weed out HIV-positive donations that are still in the window period.
A window period is when the virus has been transmitted to another person but antibodies to the virus do not yet show up in tests.
Four categories for blood
The SANBS said that in spite of the detailed questions donors answer before every blood donation, HIV-positive blood donations are constantly being detected, so a ”careful scientific analysis” categorising blood in low- and high-risk categories was introduced.
Category 1 is regular white and Indian donors, and Category 2 is coloured, new white and new Indian donors. Category 3 is black and new coloured donors; and Category 4 is lapsed donors and new black donors.
Category 1 blood is used first, working down the list as supplies are depleted. Blood in the high-risk category is used to make other blood products as technicians are able to ”inactivate” the virus.
However, this method has come under fire with urgent meetings between the SANBS and the Department of Health concluding that a review is needed.
According to a statistician at the SANBS, of ”inland” donations from Gauteng, Mpumalanga, Limpopo, North West, the Northern Cape and the Free State, 4,4% are from black donors, 3,2% Indian, 3,6% coloured and 88,9% white.
Statistics were not immediately available for KwaZulu-Natal.
Race not used in Western Cape
According to the Western Province Blood Transfusion Service, which operates separately from the SANBS, about 1 500 out of 60 000 donors (2%) are black.
Between 40% and 45% are coloured and, according to spokesperson Marika Champion, without them the province would not have enough supplies.
She said the province does not use race to form risk categories; instead it uses World Health Organisations guidelines that include the exclusion of areas that have a higher local HIV/Aids prevalence rate than the national prevalence figure.
”We use risk to determine risk,” Champion said. ”We would like to reassure our donor base about this [not using race to determine risk] because without them we wouldn’t have enough blood to serve our province,” she said.
Based on this method, which includes using ante-natal HIV/Aids surveys taken at government hospitals and clinics, they exclude Khayelitsha, Langa, Guguletu and Umfuleni, predominantly occupied by black residents, as their surveys show a higher than 30% prevalence rate.
”Nobody in their right mind can demand that we go to fetch blood from those areas,” said Graham Thurtell, also a spokesperson at the Western Cape service.
There are also two ”white” areas in the Western Cape, which the service did not name, that are excluded.
”Clearly there are areas in Cape Town where I am very hesitant to go because it would be an extra risk.
”There are coloured areas I wouldn’t go to, but there are other coloured areas where we get fabulous supplies. Maybe we should introduce a socio-economic factor into our risk profiling,” he said.
Thurtell said the service has a good pool of donors at universities and conducts one-on-one interviews with students to double-check certain answers provided on the compulsory questionnaire.
He said ”even a man of the cloth” will not be allowed to donate if the questionnaire is not completed.
”It sounds like we are trying to make life as difficult as possible for donors, but our responsibility is to the patient and not to the blood donor who may be affronted by the questions we ask,” Thurtell said.
Meanwhile, both the Western Cape and the inland services continued their pleas for blood ahead of the festive season and the anticipated increase in accidents.
Independent Democrats leader Patricia de Lille said in a statement that she and a number of people from her party will be joining the drive the boost blood supplies, and she encouraged others to do the same. — Sapa
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