Blood Bank Reports No AIDS Virus : Health: The announcement regarding 31,000 units given last year is intended to quell rumors that students have tested positive.

More than 31,000 units of blood were donated last year at Ventura County’s largest blood bank, and none were tainted with the AIDS virus, officials said Thursday.

The announcement came as United Blood Services officials tried to quell rumors at several county high schools that students had tested positive for the virus during blood drives last year, director of operations Mike Hayward said.

Blood bank officials said they heard about the rumors earlier this week while coordinating blood drives at Newbury Park and Camarillo high schools.

The rumors stemmed from national media reports on the plight of a small, rural Texas high school where six of the 197 students reported testing HIV-positive.

“Not only is the story false as far as high school students here are concerned, but as we have shown, it is also untrue for any of the people who gave blood in Ventura County last year,” Hayward said.

Blood bank directors and AIDS advocates credited an extensive screening process for discouraging high-risk donors from attempting to give blood.

But AIDS activists insisted that the absence of HIV-tainted blood is not a signal that the number of AIDS patients is declining.

“The people who give at blood banks are a select group of people, who are screened before they ever give in the first place,” said Martina Rippey, a public health nurse who heads the Ventura County AIDS Task Force.

“In our alternative-testing sites--the state-funded centers where people are tested anonymously for the HIV virus--we are running at about a 1% positive rate for everyone coming in,” Rippey said.

Prospective donors at the four United Blood Services centers countywide undergo a rigorous screening process to determine if their past activity has put them at risk of being HIV-positive, Rippey said.

“And people who know they are at risk just stay away,” she said.

Carolyn Tyner, United Blood Services’ director of donor recruitment, agreed that the blood bank’s screening program helped ensure that none of the more than 20,000 donors in 1991 had the AIDS virus.

“We have an extensive form for them to read . . . and they see that there is just no reason to donate blood if you are at risk for AIDS,” Tyner said.

Officials said 1991 was an exemplary year, especially when balanced against 1990 and 1989. Two potential donors tested HIV-positive in each of those years, Tyner said.

More than 250 Ventura County residents have been diagnosed as having AIDS since 1985, and at least 172 have died from the disease. In addition, the number of those testing HIV-positive is rising, according to county health department statistics.

As the demand for blood donors continues to increase, misinformation about acquired immune deficiency syndrome could hinder recruitment efforts, Tyner said.

That explains why United Blood Services officials took the unusual step of announcing that none of last year’s blood was tainted, said Hayward.

The high school rumor “is a wild rumor that just didn’t happen here, and we need to squelch it before people are discouraged from donating blood,” Hayward said.

Neighboring northeastern Texas schools shunned Rivercrest High School in the wake of media reports about the high infection rate, which was six times the national average of one in every 250 people.

Fears of this type of discrimination could have triggered the rumors, Hayward and Rippey said.