ABSTRACT
The ideal way to study the efficacy of a new donor-screening procedure would be to perform infectious disease screening on those donors deferred by the procedure comparing their rate of seropositivity to that of acceptable donors. To my knowledge, this approach has never been utilized for studying health history questions, almost certainly due to logistic considerations. These include obtaining an informed consent from the deferred donor for infectious disease testing and performing a separate phlebotomy to obtain a venous sample from individuals who are not eligible to donate a unit of blood.
