[Excessive spending by misuse of clinical laboratory].

Seventy five percent or more of a diagnosis comes from a proper medical history along with an excellent physical examination. This leaves to the clinical laboratory the function of supporting the findings, determining prognosis, classifying the diseases, monitoring the diseases and, in the minimum of cases, establishing the diagnosis. In recent years there has been a global phenomenon in which the allocation of resources to health care has grown in an excessive way; the Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social is not an exception with an increase of 29 % from 2009 to 2011; therefore, it is necessary to set containment and reduction without compromising the quality of patient care.

[Detection of Trypanosoma cruzi in blood donors].

Background: The American trypanosomiasis is the second parasitic disease in importance after paludism and one of the main mechanism of transmission is a blood transfusion. Our objective was to measure the effect the Tripanosoma Cruzi screening test in blood banks in the Mexican Institute of Social Security.

Methods: Information was obtained from each unit of blood collected.