Background: Reactive syphilis screening makes a donor ineligible and sends the associated components to discard. This study estimated the donation-level prevalence of VDRL seroreactivity and its sociodemographic, temporal and geographic distribution in six municipalities served by a regional blood center in Pará, Brazil, 2017–2023. Methods: Census-based retrospective analysis of 362,705 donations recorded in the SBS.Web system of the Pará State Hemotherapy and Hematology Foundation. The donation was the unit of analysis; records could not be deduplicated by donor. Confirmatory treponemal results were unavailable, so active, treated and false-positive reactions could not be distinguished. Results: 3730 donations were reactive (1.03%; 95% CI 0.99–1.06). Annual prevalence rose from 0.69% (0.62–0.76) in 2017 to 1.29% (1.19–1.39) in 2021, then fell to 1.04% (0.95–1.13). Mean donor age fell from 40.1 to 33.8 years. Reactive records were 51.0% male, 71.5% single, 61.7% secondary education, 63.4% spontaneous donations. Belém held 67.9% of them (prevalence 1.01%; 0.97–1.05) and was the only municipality with a rising trend (p = 0.02). Conclusions: Roughly one donation in a hundred was withdrawn from the transfusion chain, with the counseling and re-entry work each case entails. These are screening results, not confirmed infections, and measure an operational burden rather than syphilis prevalence.
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Araújo et al. (2026) studied this question.
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