Nation's blood supply safer than ever.

A blood transfusion now is one of the safest procedures in medicine, as opposed to 30 years ago, when a person's chance of contracting hepatitis from tainted blood during heart surgery was 30%, according to Harvey G. Klein, chief, Department of Transfusion Medicine, National Institutes of Health. "Blood in the U.S. today is extremely safe," with possibly more Americans dying from eating bad chicken or complications from general anesthesia than from a transfusion-transmitted disease.

The risk of getting hepatitis during a blood transfusion is microscopic due to improved donor screening and tests to identify viruses in donated blood. There is about one case of hepatitis in every 5,000 units of blood transfused, while the risk of HIV is somewhere in the range of one infection in every 225,000 units. "We're talking about maybe 100 infections a year in the U.S., where we transfuse 14,000,000 blood components."

Klein points to the transition from a partially paid to an all-volunteer blood donor supply as another factor in the vastly improved blood safety picture. Health officials realized that offering "incentives to donate blood cause some to be less than totally candid" about their histories. Because "paying people clearly gets a different population, you have to mark blood from a paid donor."

The plasma industry, on the other hand, does consist largely of paid donors, with the chances of finding infectious agents in plasma 10 times greater than in donated blood. The concern about infection is less troublesome with plasma, however, because, unlike blood, it can be treated to inactivate viruses.

Klein maintains that public misperceptions hinder the efforts of the American Red Cross and other blood collection agencies. While as many as one in five Americans believe there is some peril in giving blood, he claims "there is no risk of infectious disease from donating...