Mbeki to get apology
2004-12-07 22:20
Johannesburg - President Thabo Mbeki will receive a private apology from the SA National Blood Service for revealing in the media that the blood he donated had been destroyed.
The service said on Tuesday the issue of an apology to the president was a private matter, which would be dealt with by its chairperson. the Rev John Pender-Smith.
The health department slammed the service on Monday for revealing that Mbeki's blood had been rejected because he declined to complete the questionnaire while donating blood at a publicity event.
No further "discussions" would be held with the media until after the meeting of delegates of the blood service board and the health department on Saturday, said the SANBS.
The organisation has come under fire for the controversial use of race to profile the safety of donated blood.
Black people constitute less than 5% of blood donors in the country's inland areas which provide 60% of national supplies, revealed blood service statistics.
Window period proves a problem
And, in the Western Cape, the figure is only 2.2%.
This emerged while the service's board met on Tuesday to thrash out whether they should continue categorising blood from black donors as high risk as part of efforts to weed out HIV-positive donations that were still in the window period.
A window period is when the virus has been transmitted to another person, but antibodies to the virus do not yet show up in tests.
The service said that in spite of the detailed questions donors answer before every donation, HIV-positive blood donations were constantly being detected, so a "careful scientific analysis" was introduced.
Category 1 is regular white and Indian donors, Category 2 is coloured, new white and new Indian donors. Category 3 is black and new coloured donors and Category 4 is lapsed donors and new black donors.
Category 1 blood is used first, working down the list as supplies are depleted.
Blood in the high-risk category is used to make other blood products.
However, this method has come under fire with urgent meetings between the service and the health department concluding that a review is needed.
According to the Western Province Blood Transfusion Service, which operates separately from the SANBS, about 1 500 out of 60 000 donors (2%) are black.
'Use risk to determine risk'
Between 40% to 45% are coloured and, according to spokesperson Marika Champion, without them the province would not have enough supplies.
She said the province did not use race to form risk categories; instead, they used World Health Organisations guidelines that included the exclusion of areas that had a higher local HIV/Aids prevalence rate than the national figure.
"We use risk to determine risk," Champion said.
Thurtell said they had a good pool of donors at universities and conducted one-on-one interviews with students to double-check certain answers on the compulsory questionnaire.
- SAPA