marvy1

I have seen many examples of weak to 1+ examples on screening cells and 0.8% panels in Gel. Since their reformulation this has become a fact of life. The reformulation seems to bring up a lot of "garbage". If there is no clear specificity, we rule out using "home-made" 3% diluted to 0.8% cells which almost always are clean negative.

I have read that neo platelets put in syringes are viable for 6 hours but have not found any source for assigning exp time for neo platelets sterile-docked into aliquot bags designed for rbc. I do remember some facilities I have worked assigned a 4 hour outdate with the reason being the type of plastic. Does anyone else have additional information?

If you only test with Poly and IgG, what happens when the Poly is pos and the IgG is pos? Do you assume it's only IgG? Why couldn't it be both IgG and C3? If you are worried about the cost of reagents, maybe try making your own complement-coated control cells using sucrose. We find that works fine and its cheap.

I was looking into this issue a while back. I think it depends on whether you are doing computer crossmatching or not. If you are doing computer crossmatch, I haven't read anywhere how long (or short) a type and screen is valid if the patient has no recent history of pregnancy or transfusion. However, if you are still doing an immediate spin crossmatch, I would defer to others (Judd for one I believe???) who believe the best guideline for the stability of plasma in the reverse group (which equals the immediate spin) should be equal to what the manufacturer of your reverse cells recommends. In our case, that was 21 days. Sorry..I'm not at work so cannot confirm the reference at this moment. Some separate and freeze plasma for these "preop" patients although many frown upon separating cells and serum in blood banks (adds an additional level of risk of sample mixups)