Prevalence of HIV seropositivity in blood donors of Gujarat

Abstract

Introduction: Lack of health education and poor awareness leads to increase the number of source of infections in the community and resulted in the higher percentage of transfusion-transmitted HIV in India. Screening of TTIs among blood donors helpful to observe the direction and prevalence of seropositivity of HIV among healthy blood donors. Objective: To detect the HIV seropositivity among healthy blood donors in Gujarat. Materials and Methods: A retrospective cross-sectional study was conducted at Blood Bank of Gujarat among all voluntary and replacement donors. Total 7,935 donors were screened over the period of year 2010 to 2017 according the guideline of WHO. Results: Blood units were collected from replacement donors (54.1%) and voluntary blood donors (45.9%). Almost 97.4% were male donors and remaining were female donors. Around 0.088% blood donors were found seropositive for HIV. Highest incidence of HIV seropositivity was found in year 2016 & 2017. Conclusion: replacement donors were higher in number than the voluntary donors. In developing countries, availability of safe transfusion of blood & blood products is the main challenge and on the health sector of developing countries. Sometimes, replacement donors bury their medical history to donate blood for their relatives which indicate that blood safety depends mainly on right and decent reply of the screening questions. Emphasis should be given to increased awareness and change in attitude of community regarding blood donation. Blood camps should be increased to encourage the people for voluntary blood donation. Keywords: Blood Donors, HIV Seropositivity, Replacement Donors, Transfusion Transmitted Infection (TTIs), Voluntary Donors.