Efficacy control of HB blood donor screening.

If blood donor selection were an efficacious means of preventing posttransfusion hepatitis B, three conditions should be fulfilled: 1. the incidence of the disease should decrease immediately after the exclusion of blood donations that contain presumed infectivity markers; 2. the incidence of the disease should likewise decrease when donor blood is completely replaced by autologous blood; 3. retesting of donors implicated in cases of posttransfusion hepatitis B should regularly detect one or more anti-HBc positive individuals per case. Since none of these conditions turned out to be fulfilled when tried in the FRG, it remains an open question whether the transfusion-transmitted part of posttransfusion hepatitis B is significant enough to justify laborious donor screening procedures.