[Epidemiological surveillance of blood donors and residual risk of blood-borne infections in France, 2001 to 2003].

The national surveillance of French blood donors is performed by the Institut de Veille Sanitaire and the National Reference Center for Hepatitis B and C in transfusion in collaboration with the Etablissement Français du Sang and the Army blood center. The main objectives of this surveillance are to evaluate trends in prevalence and incidence rates of blood-borne infections in the blood donor population, to identify routes of contamination and to assess residual risk. This exhaustive surveillance also contributes to evaluate the blood donor selection and the impact of measures taken to prevent infections in the general population. The analyse of the database of all blood donations obtained from 2001 to 2003 has shown that prevalence rates were stable in the study period (0.60 per 10(4) donors for HIV, 8.0 per 10(4) donors for HCV, 1.8 per 10(4) first-time donors for HBs Ag and 0.56 per 10(4) donors for HTLV), The incidence rate of HIV and HBV (1 per 10(5) person-years) was three-times higher than for HCV (0.35 per 10(5) person-years) and eleven times higher than for HTLV (0.09 per 10(5) person-years). At least, the residual risk of transfusion-transmitted viral infections is very low: 1/3,150,000 donations for HIV, 1/10,000,000 donations for HCV and 1/640,000 donations for HBV. The yield of Nucleic Acid Testing (NAT) is limited since only 2 donations for HIV and 3 for HCV which were negative for antibodies were discarded thank to the NAT.