Blood Donor Groups and Crossing Over-Reply

In Reply.— With reference to Dr Fawcett's point that blood centers from areas regarded as foci of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome did not participate in the data collection, we did not intend that their information should be used as a national average. The purpose was, rather, to see if there were differences in the prevalence of infectious markers between groups of donors (volunteer, autologous, and directed) who were donating for dissimilar reasons. We agree that the decision to crossover untransfused units should be made on the basis of patient safety. In this regard, it is not possible to ignore the fact that autologous blood available for crossover has a greater likelihood of being positive for some markers of infectious disease.