Blood bankers,

Just want to take a poll:

What kind of patients at your hospital receives CMV seronegative blood products (rbcs/plts)? Note: Please exclude babies

1.    Recipients of allogeneic or autologous stem cell, bone marrow or solid organ transplants?

2.    Recipients of highly immunosuppressive chemotherapy (eg, leukaemia or lymphoma)?

3.    Pregnant women who require transfusion regardless of CMV status?

Also, my understanding is that if a person is positive for CMV antibodies, then CMV seronegative blood products are not needed. However, if the patient comes back 6 months to a year later, do we need to do repeat testing to check that the titer is still high enough to fight an exposure? Or is it once a person is positive then that is for life? Thanks in advance!

We are trying to move away from CMV seronegative products, except for neonates. Our Pediatric Hematology physicians - about a year and a half ago - stopped ordering seronegative products for their patients following a literature search for current best practices. They found that leukoreduction was at least of equivalent risk of CMV transmission. We are encouraging our adult hematology oncologists to do the same or at least test patients for CMV before ordering.

9 hours ago, ChrisW said:

We are trying to move away from CMV seronegative products, except for neonates. Our Pediatric Hematology physicians - about a year and a half ago - stopped ordering seronegative products for their patients following a literature search for current best practices. They found that leukoreduction was at least of equivalent risk of CMV transmission. We are encouraging our adult hematology oncologists to do the same or at least test patients for CMV before ordering.

Same

Same as ChrisW for 10+ years

On 5/6/2016 at 4:49 AM, ChrisW said:

We are trying to move away from CMV seronegative products, except for neonates. Our Pediatric Hematology physicians - about a year and a half ago - stopped ordering seronegative products for their patients following a literature search for current best practices. They found that leukoreduction was at least of equivalent risk of CMV transmission. We are encouraging our adult hematology oncologists to do the same or at least test patients for CMV before ordering.

Same here.  

We are not worried abut CMV neg even among peds patients unless specifically asked by physicians. The rationale being as mentioned by ChrisW 'leuckreduction' . However, if the donors happen to be SC; we do not process their blood into our inventory due to poor performance of leuckreduction filters among these demographics. 

We only use CMV- safe, except for neonates.

Our neonates and peds patients get CMV safe/LR reduced.  We only have the rare, transplant patient where the doctor is adamant that the units be serologically tested.

We're a pretty big hospital and provide products for a pretty big cancer center.  I know you excluded babies, but we also have a NICU.

We do not have CMV sero-tested products, only leukoreduced.