-Local health agencies seem to be still getting up to speed on this. The medical director for all United Blood Services locations in Las Vegas wasn’t aware of the month-old Science article. A Southern Nevada Health District spokesperson declined to speak on this “speculative” topic.
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Dr. Michael P. Busch, Director of the Blood Systems Research Institute, the research arm of United Blood Services’ parent company, Blood Systems, says, “It’s not that we’re keeping anything secret, but there’s no reason to alarm anyone.” Blood Systems also serves as the central lab for the National Institutes of Health blood safety network.
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Busch says that every year or so, a potentially blood-transferable virus is identified with preliminary data associating it with disease, but “most of the time these things don’t evolve to be a serious problem.”
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Still, the Science article has launched his organization into a collaborative effort with a number of government organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration, to establish the prevalence of XMRV in the blood donor population. That study will start with a Whittemore Peterson Institute collaboration in Reno, where 1,000 healthy donors’ blood will be screened by multiple labs. Busch estimates it will take up to six months to see how prevalent XMRV is in the blood supply, and another six months to fully develop and get FDA approval of a test for screening, if it is determined one is needed....
..Despite the local United Blood Services medical director not being aware of this development, Blood Systems Research Institute’s Busch counsels caution in a follow-up e-mail to CityBlog.
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“I appreciate that you are sensitive to unwarranted concern re the safety of the blood supply and the need to maintain an adequate number of donors to meet patient needs,” he writes. “That said I do think that persons with diagnosed CFS should probably refrain from donating until specific studies are conducted to establish whether XMRV is causally linked to CFS and the virus is present in healthy donors and transmitted by transfusions. These studies (will) evolve quickly over the next 3-12 months.”