- Published: October 3, 2022
- Updated: October 3, 2022
- University / College: The University of Queensland
- Language: English
- Downloads: 16
Whatis HIV? HIV(human immunodeficiency virus) is a virus that attacks a cell in your bodycalled CD4 T cell, which is an important part of the body immune system thatprotects the body and fights against the infections. And as our bodies can’tget rid of this virus, once you get it it’ll stay there for the rest of yourlife, and can eventually lead to the last stage of the HIV infection that’sknown as AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome).
Untiltoday, there is no effective drug or treatment for the HIV virus. The main ideaof all the HIV treatments is to prolong the patient’s life and control thesymptoms but it is unable to get rid of the virus completely. Soas we can see HIV is a serious disease that can ruin people lives and so weshould be too aware of it and try to prevent its transmission as much aspossible.
Howdoes the HIV transmit? Thefirst step to prevent HIV infections is by knowing the ways of this virustransmission. HIV can be transmitted generally by three ways: sexual contact, from a mother to the fetus during pregnancy, and through blood. This includessharing needles to inject drugs and any other sharp objects that may expose youto the HIV infected person’s blood, and of course blood transfusion. Thus, wemake sure in the blood bank to exclude the HIV infected people and who are atrisk of getting HIV from donating by a process called donor selection. Whatis donor selection? Itis a process to determine whether the individual is suitable to donate blood ornot depending on the donation criteria and conditions, those include the age, weight, general health, medical history and the present of any diseases, especially the diseases that can be transmitted through the blood. One of thoseis the HIV. Donor selection process starts with several questions includingquestions about HIV to exclude any donors with HIV permanently or at high riskof HIV temporarily. Those include if the person has AIDS symptoms, sex partnerwith AIDS, homosexual or bisexual people, having multiple sex partners, drugsabuse now or in the past, visiting of other countries with a high percentage ofHIV infected people.
Whatis the purpose of blood donor selection? Themain goal of any blood bank is to provide safe blood products. The first stepfor that is the donor selection. By performing those procedures, we can protectboth the donor and the recipient by only taking blood from healthy donors andproviding safe blood eventually for the patient.
In addition, The WHO GlobalDatabase on Blood Safety indicates that every year in 164 countries there aremore than 92 million blood donations. However, from those units, there are 1. 6million units discarded due to infectious diseases including HIV. So by gooddonor selection, we can avoid or reduce wasting this much of resources, consumables, for tests, donor’s blood, and both donor and stuff time thatresult from collecting unsuitable donations.