Malaria Screening of Blood Donors in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Background: Transfusion-associated malaria is a potentially serious complication that continues to pose risks in blood bank settings. There is a need for effective malaria screening of blood donations to improve on the current exclusion policies of potentially infected carriers on the basis of clinical and travel history. We evaluated the potential usefulness of ELISA screening for malaria antibody and P. falciparum antigen among Saudi blood donors. Materials and Methods: A total of 1756 donors were studied, 1100 from the malaria endemic Southern Region and 656 donors from the known malaria-free Riyadh area. Results: The overall antibody prevalence for the antibody was 7.6%, in comparison to only 0.17% for the antigen. In the endemic region, the antibody positivity rate of 9.1% was almost double the rate in the non-endemic area (4.8%). There was no difference in the antigen prevalence rates; 0.18% in endemic and 0.15% in non-endemic areas. Conclusions: In malaria endemic countries like Saudi Arabia, excluding antibody-positive donations would result in too much wastage of blood units. However, antigen malaria testing appears to offer a potential utility, as only few donations would be rejected.

Malaria seroprevalence in blood bank donors from endemic and non-endemic areas of Venezuela

“…These results were similar to those found in a study of 1,756 blood donor samples from endemic and non-endemic areas of Saudi Arabia, where a 9.1% antibody-positive rate and 0.18% antigen prevalence were found for the samples from the endemic region when analyzed by ELISA (Saeed et al 2002). In the non-endemic region, 4.8% antibody and 0.15% antigen positive rates were found.…”

Malaria Screening of Blood Donors

“…The conclusions that may be drawn from these observations are twofold. Firstly, in our group of donors the number of donations that are positive for malaria is substantially lower than in Saeed and colleagues' group of donors 1 . The second important conclusion is that given our low rate of antibody positivity, it is not too inconvenient to perform the standard microscopy in a timely and thorough enough fashion to definitively exclude malaria and thus enable these TBF-and TBS-negative donations to be made available for clinical use.…”

“…Agreeing with Saeed et al that up-front microscopic examination of blood smears is not cost-effective for detecting malaria in asymptomatic individuals, we have adopted, as an alternative to the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health (MOH) directives for microscopic screening for malaria, antibody screening using an enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELISA) kit identical to that used by Saeed and his colleagues 1 . In our case, we use an automated robotics platform.…”

Tamización de malaria en donantes de sangre de Cali, Colombia.

“…En la evaluación de esta prueba se debe tener en cuenta que algunos donantes pueden perderse debido a la posible persistencia prolongada de los anticuerpos, sobre todo en personas que son o han sido residentes de zonas endémicas (19,20) y que, además, la prueba puede ser menos eficiente para detectar bajos niveles de anticuerpos, lo cual es común en la etapa inicial de la enfermedad, y puede resultar casos de falsos negativos (20,21).…”