BTSB says its priority is to ensure as many are tested as possible

THE Blood Transfusion Service Board says everyone identified as having received potentially infected blood product will eventually be contacted by the board and informed.

However, Dr Joan Power said telling the recipients was not the board's priority. This was to ensure that as many people as possible had come forward lord testing, she said, and it was proving to be a massive task.

Dr Power said she believed the vast majority of people concerned have already come in for tests as a result of the general appeal for anyone who received blood products. However, in more than 50 per cent of all cases it has not yet proved possible to trace the precise recipients of doses of the anti D identified as potentially infected. This is because records are incomplete.

It is believed almost all these people have already come in for testing. For instance, Dr Power said, more than 17,500 people who had received antiD in 19771 78 had been tested.

The board has identified 4,062 doses of anti D made from plasma from "patient X", and approximately 400 further doses of product made with plasma from "donor Y". The doses, which include plasma taken from patientX, were made during 1976/1977, and issued over the following years. The doses made using plasma from Donor Y were distributed between 1991 and 1994.

Dr Power said the figure for potentially infectious doses made using patient X's plasma was an outside figure, and the number of infectious doses was likely to be only half that figure.

Positive Action, the group representing women who were given infected anti D, has called for an study to be carried out to track down and medically assess all the recipients of doses identified as being potentially infectious.

"People have the right to know if they have at any time been in contact with a contaminated blood product," said Ms Jane O'Brien. Her organisation had recently been contacted by a woman who, after she had gone to the board for a hepatitis C test - in which she tested positive - had then been told by the board that they knew she had been given anti D from a batch which was potentially infectious.

Ms O'Brien said the board should be more "pro active" in approaching people who had been exposed to potentially infectious product.

However, the board has said it is working with very incomplete records. In one instance, 55 potentially infectious doses went to one, particular hospital but it has not been possible to trace any of the doses to recipients.

Dr Power said she did not believe there were a significant number of people "out there" who had not been asked to come in for testing.

The board has said tracing the infected blood and blood products was proving to be an huge task and, while there was not a problem with resources, there was a problem with finding suitably qualified personnel.