The rate of confirmed bacterial contamination of PC units was low. Nevertheless, clinicians must be aware of this risk. The risk of bacterial contamination does not warrant universal preference of APCs. It must be questioned whether routine bacterial screening by a culture method can sufficiently prevent contaminated products from being transfused due to the delay until a positive signal in the culture system and due to false-negative results.

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Sensitivity was best for BacT/ALERT, whereas specificity was enhanced for Pall eBDS and Scansystem. Scansystem required specially trained staff, whereas BacT/ALERT and Pall eBDS were easy, quick, user-friendly and objective methods.

This PCR screening strategy is an effective tool for obtaining deeper insight into the ABO gene diversity and diversification and may be useful to increase the quality of the ABO sequence database.