All other states will have 12 weeks.
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The Food and Drug Administration now recommends that all blood donations in the U.S.be screened for the Zika virus.
On the list: Alabama, Arizona, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, South Carolina and Texas. The most widely recognized source of the infection is through the bite of an infected mosquito.
Most of those cases were brought in by people who were infected while traveling overseas.
Right now, there are 2,517 confirmed cases of Zika in the US; 9,011 in USA territories. Yet two serum tests confirmed the presence of Zika antibodies in his blood.
Sabrina Cooper is a blood donor specialist and says Geisinger has already been testing for people with the Zika virus for several months now.
An executive for America’s Blood Centers, which has more than 600 locations in the USA and Canada, warned that the amount of work needed to comply with the FDA’s timeline is “titanic”. Adding Zika to other blood-borne viruses that collection banks already screen for, including HIV and the West Nile, costs less than $10 United States dollars.
This move comes after the FDA officially advised all blood banks to screen for the virus since its worldwide outbreak.
‘It has not yet been FDA licensed, so it is still in the investigational phase.
“The Zika virus is potentially a very bad threat, and I really do agree with testing patients that come in”, said Maldonado. Earlier this year, Puerto Rico had to shut down blood collections, costing the territory millions of dollars in imported blood from the mainland, Covin said.
“Overall, the number of persons with suspected [Guillain-Barre] and evidence of Zika virus or flavivirus infection was 2.5 times greater than the number of persons with suspected [Guillain-Barre] and no evidence of Zika virus infection”, the report says.
“There is still much uncertainty regarding the nature and extent of Zika virus transmission”, said Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research.
“The transfusion of a pregnant woman with blood infected with the Zika virus could have awful consequences”, Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said. Marks said the concern is that they have been unknowingly infected and give blood.
Back in February, the FDA also asked that people who had traveled to places where the Zika virus is prevalent, or who have symptoms that suggest infection, should wait a month before donating blood.
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