Stay on the beach

Seeing as I'm having a self-appointed "study day", this is my second post today.  If you eat your vegetables, there could be more.

I'm looking through some notes I jotted down from a mad haematologist and saw something interesting in his comments about HIV and blood transfusions.  Apparently every single blood donation in Australia is subjected to a reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction test to check if there are any fragments of HIV in it.  They do this because the regular serum antibody tests used to diagnose HIV in patients take some weeks/months to become positive after exposure.

The cost to do this is $600 million every year.  The benefit is that over a 10 year period it is estimated that there is a 50% chance that one person will be prevented from contracting HIV from a blood transfusion.  So that works out at $12 billion (that's "million" with a "b") per life, right?

That's pretty extraordinary.

I recognize that there are hefty political and psychological factors involved, especially given the problems with HIV and blood products in the past, which lead to public hysteria, vilification of gays, and the virtually assured infection with HIV of the poor old haemophiliacs.  But $12 billion per life really does seem a little excessive to me.  Worldwide charity donations after the 2004 tsunami was about $7 billion.  The tsunami killed over 200,000 people.  So that's about $30,000 per life.  Think about it, think think about it.

Anyway, the mad haematologist's assessment of the risk of contracting HIV from a blood transfusion was that it was about as likely as being torn apart by a shark while being struck by lightning.  So presumably if you stay out of the ocean you're even less likely to be eaten by a shark.  Or catch HIV.  Think about it.