US Bans Blood From
Returning US Troops
By Paul Simao
10-24-3
ATLANTA (Reuters) - American soldiers returning from Iraq are being
told not to give blood for up to one year to prevent the possible
spread of a parasite into the U.S. blood supply, federal health
officials said on Thursday.
The precautionary ban was ordered by the Department of Defense and the
nation's largest association of blood banks following an outbreak of
cutaneous leishmaniasis among U.S. soldiers serving in the Persian
Gulf and Afghanistan.
Leishmaniasis, which is endemic in the Middle East, tropics and some
parts of southern Europe, is usually spread by the bite of sand flies.
Those infected develop painless skin lesions that can, if left
untreated, cause scars.
Visceral leishmaniasis, the more serious form of the disease, can
damage internal organs and cause death.
The new blood donor restrictions will apply to soldiers for 12 months
after their last day in Iraq, according to a report published on
Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The lengthy deferral is due to the difficulty of detecting the
parasite responsible for leishmaniasis, which can incubate for several
months and produce no symptoms or only mild illness in those infected.
UP TO 25 DAYS
It also can survive for up to 25 days in blood stored under normal
conditions, according to the Department of Defense's Armed Services
Blood Program office. There are no reports of infections occurring
through blood transfusions in the United States, where incidence of
the disease is rare.
The World Health Organization estimates that 2 million cases of the
disease occur each year, mostly in developing nations in Africa.
Between August, 2002 and September, 2003, a total of 22 U.S. soldiers
in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan contracted leishmaniasis. All
recovered after being treated for three weeks at Walter Reed Medical
Center in Washington, D.C.
Another nine cases have surfaced in the past two months.
Defense officials believe that the majority of the soldiers, who came
from different branches of the U.S. military, were infected while
serving in areas around the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and An Nassiriya.
Recent tests conducted by the U.S. military found that more than 1
percent of sand flies in Iraq carried the parasite.
Although the ban will remove thousands of servicemen from the rolls of
blood donors, many of these would already have been excluded because
of the military's existing blood ban for soldiers returning from areas
where malaria was endemic.
There is no vaccine or medication to prevent the disease, and those
infected are banned for life from donating blood.
© 2003 Reuters
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