New Blood, Old Blood, or No Blood?

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The use of blood transfusions in medicine is so well established that the procedure is an afterthought to many physicians. Scientific advances have rendered blood and blood products extremely safe through the introduction of donor-deferral strategies, infectious-disease testing, pathogen-inactivation methods, and recombinant DNA technologies for particular therapeutic proteins. These advances have dramatically reduced the likelihood of transfusion-transmitted disease so that the risk of transfusion-associated human immunodeficiency virus 1 or hepatitis C infection, for example, is now on the order of 1 in 2 million donated units.1 Concern persists about the transmission of other infectious agents, for which testing is not . . .