Blood Donations

Ericaa

Hey guys, I have a question for anyone here who's familiar with the blood donation process.

My partner is from Slovakia, so before they'll take a blood donation from him, they test his blood to see if it's up to standard or whatever.
Other than being foreign, he is good to go in terms of the other conditions they have for donations.

In '09, he went to give blood for the first time, they took a sample to test and told him they'd contact him with the results. A while later they contact him to tell him he's ineligible to donate because he tested positive for Hep C. He knew that the results were wrong so he went to his own GP to get tested himself. The test came back negative.

Last month he went to give blood. He had not attempted to donate since the false positive. They still had his details on file so when they pulled them up, he was marked as a 'Deferral'. He was told that his GP never forwarded on the results of the test to them, so all he needed to do was contact his GP to send on the negative result. He was told that after that was cleared up, he could come to give a donation.
So the GP sent on the results, and my partner received a phone call from the IBTS to say that he can't donate blood, purely because of the false positive.
They openly admit that it was in fact a false positive, but that their current guidelines mean that he can't donate for an unspecified amount of time.


Can anyone shed a little bit of light on this situation, when can he donate again? Why do the guidelines exclude his donation even though he is perfectly healthy?
He was initially told by a nurse at the blood drive that it will be no problem to donate once it was cleared up, why would she say that if the current guidelines say no? The nurse had also said that they had let some people with false positives to start donating now, why can my partner not?

Thanks for reading!

sam34

please read the charter. we don't comment on personal medical issues here.