Dole Outlines New Red Cross Blood Testing

A new centralized blood testing system will make it easier to cope with any successors to the AIDS virus as the most-feared potential contaminant in the U.S. blood supply, officials of the American Red Cross said here Monday.

Elizabeth Hanford Dole, former U.S. transportation secretary and now Red Cross president, outlined a system, first announced Sunday, that will centralize testing, record-keeping and oversight on the 10 million pints of blood the Red Cross collects every year.

“Instead of continuing to patch and bandage a system that evolved in the 1940s, we will move to the next generation,” Dole said. “Because of the AIDS epidemic, nothing short of a transformation is needed.”

In detailing the new system at the Red Cross’ annual convention, Dole thanked government officials for criticisms that served as a “catalyst” for action by the Red Cross.

One of the officials, Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., held hearings last July questioning the safety of the nation’s blood supply because of clerical errors at Red Cross blood banks. And the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly criticized Red Cross blood centers over the last year for such problems.

The Red Cross, which handles about half the nation’s blood supply, adopted new quality control procedures last August, but that was not enough, said Dr. Jeffrey McCullough, senior vice president for blood services at the Red Cross. Both McCullough and Dole have assumed their posts since last summer.

The newly proposed changes will allow nationwide quality control and speedy action that heretofore have been difficult to achieve in the half of the nation’s blood supply that the Red Cross collects, McCullough added.

“We’re going to design and implement the blood bank of the future,” McCullough said. “So that the next time there’s a new virus that’s found, we can put that test in place promptly and inexpensively in every one of our centers.

“If we only have to put the test in eight laboratories,, and they all are on the same computer, and they use the same procedures, we can do it in a matter of days.”

Key to the plan are no more than 10 regional facilities for testing blood collected at the group’s 53 blood centers throughout the United States. Each collection center now does its own testing for seven diseases, including AIDS and hepatitis.

The Red Cross’s board of governors voted Sunday to spend up to $120 million over the next 2 1/2 years for these changes.

By October, the agency plans to identify a handful of blood centers that will be shut down for eight weeks to be re-equipped. Other temporary shutdowns of the rest of the centers will follow in phases, but they won’t begin before January, 1992.

There are two Red Cross branches in California--the Los Angeles-Orange County unit and one in San Jose.

In San Diego, the independent San Diego Blood Bank and smaller community and hospital blood banks provide the county’s civilian blood supply. They may be asked to step up their donations to compensate for blood not collected in California by the Red Cross during the changeover.

Otherwise, the Red Cross’s changes will have little immediate effect in San Diego.

But independent blood banks, which collect the other half of the nation’s blood supply, eventually might also benefit from the proposed changes.

The 2,400 hospital and community blood banks across the country eventually might be able to participate in a computerized donor record system, said Jeffrey Solomon, chief of the American Assn. of Blood Banks, which represents the independents.

The planned Red Cross computer system, which officials will begin installing in January, will give the Red Cross a better way to keep track of both donors and the blood they donate, McCullough said.

Until recently, Red Cross and the smaller independent blood banks had operated separately, and sometimes, in competition.

“I think the old ‘wars’ of the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s are over. They ended with AIDS,” said Solomon, speaking by telephone from his Arlington, Va., office. “It’s just about time for all of us to pull together as a single group. I think we can help each other.”

He noted that the association has already agreed to cooperate with Red Cross by stepping up blood donations during the phased shutdowns of Red Cross centers.

Both McCullough and Solomon agree that the U.S. blood supply is as safe as existing testing technology will allow.

The recent advent of a test for hepatitis C, previously undetectable, has cut the number of transfusion-associated hepatitis cases tenfold, Solomon said.

With AIDS, the major problem is the estimated 1 in 150,000 pints of blood that come from people who acquired the AIDS virus too recently for current tests to detect.