Bloodborne HIV: Don't Get Stuck!

Protect yourself from bloodborne HIV during healthcare and cosmetic services

Patient observed sterile treatment for donating blood

Risk to get HIV from donating blood

If a blood bank reuses needles and/or tubes to collect blood, without any effort to clean, the risk to transmit HIV from an infected to a subsequent donor may be estimated at 10% (similar to risks with intravenous injections, as explained here). If all instruments are new disposables, you have no risk to get HIV while donating blood.

POST for donating blood

Donating blood is a public service. Those who want your blood should allay your fears by demonstrating for your satisfaction that the equipment is new. They are asking, you are offering.

POST for donating blood
1. Avoid skin-piercing procedures Insist that those who collect your blood use only new, disposable instruments. If not, don’t take the risk – even if those who want your blood swear up and down that the reused instruments are sterile. If enough people do this, WHO, donors, and blood banks in Africa will shift all blood collection to new disposable equipment – something they should have done long ago!
2. Use new disposable instruments Ask that whoever wants to collect your blood does so with a new needle, tube, and collection bag taken from a sealed plastic bag in front of you. 
3. You sterilize the instruments This does not apply to blood donations.
4. Ask providers how they sterilize instruments

For blood donations, this does not apply. Those who want your blood should use new disposable equipment.

This applies if you are selling plasma. We advise you not to do that to avoid whatever risk there is, big or small.

Evidence people got HIV while donating blood

Many studies in Africa have found that blood donors – often paid replacement donors – are more likely to be HIV-positive than other adults in the community. The source of their HIV is unknown. But in any case, such studies suggest that some people got HIV while donating blood.

Selling plasma?

Companies buy plasma – blood with the red cells removed – to make into various drugs. They try to buy plasma at low cost, often from poor people or countries. To get plasma, someone takes blood from a vein, then passes it through machines to separate plasma from red cells, and then re-inject the red cells back into the person who gave blood. Sterilizing the machines is essential to protect those whose blood is processed, but failures have been all too common (next paragraph). Selling plasma is safer in rich countries where governments investigate mistakes and enforce sterile procedures. But even there, whatever anyone would pay you would not cover your risk.

Evidence that donating blood or plasma infected donors: Collecting plasma infected hundreds of commercial plasma donors in India and Mexico in the late 1980s, tens of thousands in China during 1990-95, and at least 10 in Spain in the late 1980s (click on , and others elsewhere (click on “and unexplained cases” in the index on the right of this page; then click on pages for each country; this is likely not a complete list, but these are the reports I have found).