Ensuring blood safety
We recognise that the Australian community has confidence and trust in the Australian Red Cross Blood Service to have one of the safest blood supplies in the world. It is our most important driver as an organisation.
Each time you give blood, we test your donation for ABO (blood type), Rh groups (i.e. positive or negative) and red cell antibodies.
We also test all donations for five transfusion-transmissible infectious diseases, using seven different tests:
HIV/AIDS
hepatitis B
hepatitis C
Human T-cell Lymphotropic Virus- HTLV
syphilis.
Specifically, we test for the hepatitis B surface antigen, antibody to hepatitis C, antibody to both HIV-1 and HIV-2, antibody to HTLV types I and II and antibodies to syphilis.
We test all donations for HIV-1 and hepatitis C RNA using Nucleic Acid Testing (NAT). This process is different from traditional testing because it looks for the actual presence of viruses, in this case HIV and HCV. Most other tests detect the presence of antibodies, which are the body's response to an infection and which take time to develop. NAT provides an opportunity to further improve the safety of the blood supply by reducing the window period', which is the time between exposure to a virus to the time current tests are able to detect antibodies to the virus.
We also perform a test for malaria on donations from donors who have reported residence in, or travel to, an area with malaria.
http://www.donateblood.com.au/about-blood/ensuring-safety