Leukemia Virus Type I 1 Infection Frequently Goes Undetected in Contemporary US Blood Donors

Serologic screening for human T-cell leukemia virus type I (HTLV-I) infection was begun in US blood banks with the licensure of enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA) in December 1988. We examined the donation histories of the first 60 Western blot (WB)-confirmed HTLV-1/11 positive donors to one blood center and found 8 had made 16 previous donations that scored negative on the screening ELISA. All 16 donations had ELISA absorbance below the cutoff for a positive assay, but still well above that of the average donation (1 7.6% f 5.7% of the cutoff). In a more extensive study, 1 7 donations from a total of 61,752 at six

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