Surveillance of Infections Among Tissue Donors

NHS Blood & Transplant (NHSBT) Tissue Services operate a tissue donation and banking programme. Donations include surgical bone (mainly femoral heads), skin, tendons and heart valves from living and/or deceased donors. Additionally, NHSBT runs the National Bone Marrow registry and a cord blood bank. All tissue donors (including stem cell and cord blood donors) are routinely tested for markers of infection for HIV, HCV, HBV, HTLV and syphilis infections.

Since October 1999, reports of infected donors identified have been passed to the NHSBT/HPA Epidemiology Unit by NHSBT clinicians for collation. A scheme to monitor testing of tissue and cell donors started collecting data prospectively in January 2005. Amendments were made during 2009 in order to allow for the collection of additional data (e.g. anti-HBc and discretionary testing of tissue and cell donors). Data are also gathered on the number of samples tested by the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service (SNBTS) since January 2005, and by the Northern Ireland Blood Transfusion Service (NIBTS) since January 2007.

Tissue donors

In England during 2010, 530 deceased donors and 4,006 living surgical bone donors were tested by NHSBT. Excluding anti-HBc screening, four infected donors were identified giving an overall frequency of 88.2 infections per 100,000 donors tested . This included detection of treponemal antibodies in two surgical bone donors and one deceased donor, and current HBV infection in two surgical bone donors. No HCV, HIV, or HTLV infections were detected.  In Scotland, a further 1470 tissue donors were tested, one of whom tested positive for treponemal antibodies giving a rate of 68.0 infections per 100,000 donations. No infections were identified among the 408 donors tested in Northern Ireland. (Data not shown, see supplementary tables for more information).

Cord blood donors

A total of 2,084 cord blood donors were tested by NHSBT during 2010, 26 of whom were confirmed positive for markers of infection. Two donors were HTLV positive and one was HCV positive.  Twenty-three donors were confirmed as anti-HBc positive with levels of anti-HBs

For further information, please see our 2010 annual review entitled 'Safe supplies: Focusing on epidemiology' 

Last reviewed: 4 October 2011