Prevalence of HHV-8 in U.S. blood donors is low

One less thing to worry less about regarding transfusion-transmitted infections.

 

Transfusion: Prevalence of human herpesvirus 8 in healthy blood donors is low.

The first systematic study of human herpesvirus 8 in U.S. blood donors found that the prevalence of detectable genomes of HHV-8, which causes Kaposi's sarcoma, is very low in healthy donors. According to the study, featured in the May issue of Transfusion, a sensitive and quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction assay was used to detect HHV-8 DNA from purified CD19+ B lymphocytes from 962 randomly selected U.S. whole-blood donors.

Read the abstract and editorial.