More Donations Being Rejected : New Tests Drain S.D. Blood Supplies

San Diego County’s blood supplies are at an “extremely critical level” due to a high discard rate resulting from two new tests and because of an increasing demand for blood in emergencies, officials said Friday.

“Even though more than 8,500 San Diegans gave blood during the month of October, less than 8,000 pints were usable,” said Lynn Stedd, spokeswoman for the San Diego Blood Bank, which supplies all 27 civilian hospitals in the county.

More than 6% of the donations are not usable, she said, because of new tests to screen out blood that might be disease-tainted.

“That factor coupled with the overwhelming amount of blood used to save trauma patients recently has placed the community in an extreme emergency shortage of blood,” she said.

Early this summer, the San Diego bank began using the two blood tests to help detect non-A and non-B hepatitis in response to public fear over the transmission of diseases through blood transfusion. One of the new tests, called the core antibody test, is used to detect antibodies that develop when a person has hepatitis. The other is the ALT (alanine amino transferase) test, which helps determine whether a blood donor might have hepatitis itself.

Neither test, however, shows conclusively that the tested person has hepatitis.

Additionally, the bank uses three other tests to detect syphilis, AIDS antibodies and hepatitis.

Adding to the blood shortage is the fact that hospital trauma units in the county are becoming more effective in their life-saving efforts, thus adding to the demand, according to Stedd.

“Now they’re saving people that they wouldn’t have before . . . but they’re also using more blood,” she said.

An official at Mercy Hospital, which is a trauma center, said he has noticed a shortage in the blood inventory at the hospital, but not to the point “where we jeopardize patients’ lives.”

“Indeed, we have been using a lot of blood, compared to previous years when we were not a trauma center,” said Cesar D. Candari, a pathologist for 16 years at Mercy Hospital’s blood bank.

He said the hospital is using almost 9,000 pints of blood a year, about 2,000 more than before it began the trauma center.

Laura Brien, community relations director at Community Hospital of Chula Vista, said blood use at the hospital has sometimes been restricted to emergencies, because doctors “can’t get it as much or as (quickly) as they want.”

In July, the bank supplied county hospitals with 9,537 pints of blood; in August the number was 9,347; in September, 9,444, and in October, 9,833.

Stedd said Friday that the supplies of four of the eight blood types were below the safety level at the bank.

However, a positive sign is that the number of donors has been increasing here, unlike in San Francisco, for example, where the number of donors has been decreasing.

“We don’t have that problem here,” she said.

She said she expects that a record number of donors in San Diego will be established by the end of the year.