Number of recent sexual partners among blood donors in Brazil: associations with donor demographics, donation characteristics, and infectious disease markers

Abstract

BACKGROUND Brazilian blood centers ask candidate blood donors about the number of sexual partners in the last 12 months. Candidates who report a number over the limit are deferred. We studied the implications of this practice on blood safety. STUDY DESIGN AND METHODS We analyzed demographic characteristics, number of heterosexual partners, and disease marker rates among 689,868 donations from three Brazilian Centers between July 2007 and December 2009. Donors were grouped based on maximum number of partners allowed in the last 12 months for each center. Chi-square and logistic regression analysis were conducted to examine associations between demographic characteristics, number of sex partners, and individual and overall positive markers rates for HIV, HTLV-1/2, HBV, HCV, and syphilis. RESULTS First-time, younger and more educated donors were associated with a higher number of recent sexual partners, as was male gender in São Paulo and Recife (p <0.001). Serologic markers for HIV, syphilis and overall were associated with multiple partners in São Paulo and Recife (p<0.001), but not in Belo Horizonte (p= 0.05, 0.94, 0.75, respectively). In logistic regression analysis, number of recent sexual partners were associated with positive serologic markers (AOR=1.2–1.5) especially HIV (AOR=1.0–4.4). CONCLUSIONS Number of recent heterosexual partners was associated with HIV positivity and overall rates of serological markers of sexually transmitted infections. The association was not consistent across centers, making it difficult to define the best cut-off value. These findings suggest the use of recent heterosexual contacts as a potentially important deferral criterion to improve blood safety in Brazil.

Understanding noncompliance with selective donor deferral criteria for high‐risk behaviors in Australian blood donors

“…Currently, Australian donors are not questioned about the number of recent sexual partners. In contrast, in some countries such as Brazil, questions about the number of recent sexual partners are asked during predonation assessment . Considering the merits of including a question assessing the number of recent sexual partners, the study by Goldman and coworkers is relevant.…”

Questionnaire-Related Deferrals in Regular Blood Donors in Norway

“…If the new sexual partner does not belong to any risk group as listed in the donor questionnaire, the real impact on donor safety by this subject is disputable indeed. In Norway, it has earlier been reported that the blood donors have “low-risk behaviour” [15], thus contrasting a more recent report from Brazil [16]. It has also been indicated that the combination of a written questionnaire and an oral face-to-face interview does not ensure that the donors provide all relevant information [17].…”

Methodological guidelines for reducing the complexity of data warehouse development for transactional blood bank systems

“…All these data came from heterogeneous transactional blood donation systems and are now part of our DW, which was built using the practices discussed in this work. Several analytical results were obtained, and can be found in the related references [9, 6, 26, 23, 25, 15]. …”