BACKGROUND During the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the global health community sought to make vaccine available "in developing nations in the same timeframe as developed nations." However, richer nations placed advance orders with manufacturers, leaving poorer nations dependent on the quantity and timing of vaccine donations by manufacturers and rich nations. Knowledge of public support for timely donat...

BACKGROUND Nucleic acid amplification testing is recommended for screening blood donations; however, they are not widely available in developing countries such as Iranian. Confidential unit exclusion (CUE) gives blood donors the opportunity to confidentially indicate whether their blood is or is not suitable for transfusion to others. Hoewever, its effectiveness in improving blood safety has re...

Objectives To explore regional variations in donation of cadaveric solid organs and tissues across the four devolved health administrations of the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). Design A secondary analysis of databases from NHS Blood & Transplant (1990-2009) and from the National Organ Procurement Service for the Republic of Ireland, Eurotransplant International Foundation...

Deceased organ donation is much less prominent in Japan than it is in Western and other Asian countries. Because a shortage of organ donation is a serious social issue in Japan, various solutions to the issue have been considered. Although it was believed that the most critical factor in the organ shortage was the absence of a well-established social system, no prior studies attempted to analyz...

Conditional and directed deceased organ donations occur when donors (or often their next of kin) attempt to influence the allocation of their donated organs. This can include asking that the organs are given to or withheld from certain types of people, or that they are given to specified individuals. Donations of these types have raised ethical concerns, and have been prohibited in many countri...

A series of experimental studies by multiple groups of researchers have found that displaying images of watching eyes causes people to behave more prosocially. It is not yet clear whether watching eyes increase prosocial motivation per se, or whether they simply make people's behavior more normative. Here, we report results from a surreptitious behavioral experiment examining the impacts of wat...

Following reports of West Nile neuroinvasive disease in the north-eastern area of Italy in 2009, all blood donations dating from the period between 1 August and 31 October 2009 in the Rovigo province of the Veneto region were routinely checked to exclude those with a positive nucleic acid test for West Nile virus (WNV). Only one of 5,726 blood donations was positive (17.5 per 100,000 donations;...

Regurgitations of blood among vampire bats appear to benefit both direct and indirect fitness. To maximize inclusive fitness, reciprocal food sharing should occur among close kin. Why then do females with kin roost-mates help non-kin? We tested the hypothesis that helping non-kin increases a bat's success at obtaining future donations by expanding its network of potential donors. On six occasio...

Monitoring trends in residual risk of transfusion-transmitted viral infections is important to assess improvements in blood safety and to adapt the risk reduction policies. These trends were analysed in France over 4 periods of 3 years (1992-1994, 1995-1997, 1998-2000 and 2001-2003). The 2001-2003 estimates were compared to the results of HIV-1 and HCV NAT implemented on all blood donations in ...

West Nile virus (WNV) is transmitted to humans primarily by infected mosquitoes. However, WNV also can be transmitted through infected blood products or solid organs (1). Since 2003, the U.S. blood supply has been routinely screened for WNV RNA. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommends that blood collection agencies perform WNV nucleic acid testing (NAT) year-round on all blood donatio...