Voluntariness stands for one of the four pillars of ethics in blood donation; it is, however, more related to tradition than to legislation. Because it seems necessary to apply "marketing" techniques to blood collection in order to meet the needs in blood components, both in terms of quantity and quality, one wonders if this may be at the expense of this principle of voluntariness. This seminar-belonging actually to a series of seminars in Ethics in Transfusion Medicine-aimed at questioning the possible weakness of voluntariness in the field of blood donation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTransfus Clin Biol
February 2016
Plasma therapy consists in bringing to a patient in need - in general suffering a severe, resistant to current therapy, and even lethal infection - plasma or specific, fractioned, antibodies, along with other immunoglobulins and possibly healing factors that can be obtained from immunized blood donors; donors (voluntary and benevolent) can be either actively immunized individuals or convalescent persons. Plasma therapy has been used since the Spanish flu in 1917-1918, and regularly then when viral epidemics threatened vulnerable populations, the last reported occurrence being the 2013-2015 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa. The precise action mechanism of plasma therapy is not fully delineated as it may function beyond purified, neutralizing antibodies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPulmonary oedemas occurring during or after a blood transfusion appear as the most frequent serious immediate incidents in the French hemovigilance database. They include transfusion-associated circulatory overload (TACO) and transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI). TACO are a major cause of transfusion-related death in France.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe report a case of transient acquired and isolated factor VII deficiency associated with severe head trauma. A 16-year-old boy was involved in a motor vehicle accident. CT scan showed frontal brain contusion and a cerebral haematoma (5 cm).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: In order to determine whether auto antibodies were restricted to some subtypes of epilepsy, we included 81 unselected epileptic patients and 81 controls, studied clinical data, EEG, neuroimaging, measured antinuclear (ANA), anticardiolipin (aCL) and beta2GP1 antibodies.
Results: Epilepsy was active in 74 patients, generalised in 78 and partial in 9. Auto antibodies were positive at the same frequency and the same level among patients and controls (ANA+ 17% vs.