Work has been under way for some time in the field of blood transfusion medicine on the development of techniques for disinfecting donated blood. If it were to be 100% successful, this approach would offer the major advantage of removing all pathogenic micro-organisms from donor blood, even those for which the blood currently is not – or cannot be – tested. Theoretically, the introduction of these so-called pathogen inactivation techniques would mean that the selection of donors and the testing of the blood for the presence of micro-organisms would become matters of secondary importance.