We are a hospital system with 8 hospitals; the main facility has a microbiology department.  When blood product cultures are required due to febrile transfusion reactions, our community hospitals send several pigtails for culture.  This is not a great sample as it is not exactly what is in the bag, but transport of an open blood product is difficult and a potential biohazard.  Is there an easy/safe way to send the entire  "open" bag, or a product that could be used to create an acceptable sample?  Appreciate any ideas!

   We have the same thing. We put ours into the Bactec bottles and place the Bactec bottles into incubate in our Bactec.

Do you have data, percentage of positive blood cultures of donor units implicated in a febrile reaction to blood transfusion?

Always sent the bag by placing it in another zip lock type bag.   A lot of our bags came back to the Blood Bank with the administration set still connected so we would seal the tubing and send the bag.  

I would recommend sealing the bag in a zip lock, infusion set and all.

Could you have the community hospital inoculate the Blood culture bottles used by your main Microbiology laboratory and transport those instead of the bags themselves.  When we wish to culture a blood bag we inoculate the blood culture bottle here at our facility as well and set it up on the Bacti Alert. 

You culture ALL febrile reactions?  I believe we only do an occasional platelet, cryo or plasma, and that only on the specific order by a pathologist.

Scott