Pathogen reduction in blood products

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.