Bloody Shame.

• Author: Matta, Marie
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

My husband and I read Caroline Waters' article "Bloody Shame" (July) with interest, as we are both ineligible to donate blood for a period of two years due to our travels.

While our deferral in itself did not come as a surprise, the destination that caused our exclusion did. We lived in Singapore and the Philippines, which both have the dengue fever-bearing mosquito, and Singapore was one of the countries at the heart of the SARS crisis last year. But those locations were not the problem. The reason we were deferred was a one-day visit to the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on the border of North and South Korea.

Apparently, the DMZ is home to a mosquito that bears a particular strain of malaria that can remain dormant in the bloodstream for up to two years. We were in the DMZ for only one day, in January, in subzero temperatures. It is doubtful that...