Identifying the Types of Bacteria in Out-Dated Platelet Concentrate Units from Al Shifa Hospital Blood Bank

Abstract

Blood transfusion is one of the most dangerous therapy that could any doctor describe, because beside its great benefit it could have a chance for many transmittable life threatening agents like Human Immunodeficiency virus (HIV), Hepatitis-B virus (HBV), Hepatitis-C virus (HCV) and the one agent of our concern Bacteria, which may be related to post transfusion sepsis .Transfusion sepsis due to bacterial contamination of blood and blood components is serious problem compared to the great decrease in the incidence of transfusion of HIV, HBV and HCV, and this decrease come basically from the pre testing of blood and blood components for these transmittable agents. The most common blood components exposes to bacterial contamination is the Platelet Concentrate unit, because its unique storage conditions. Also it bears a big challenge because the golden way (Blood Culture) take almost longer time than the unit life shelf itself, that makes it unacceptable to be the pretesting method for platelet bacterial contamination (like in case of HIV, HBV and HCV). As Al-Shifa hospital blood bank is the largest center that prepares, stores and transfuses platelet concentrate, so it was the target population to define the problem. one hundred and fifty units were collected after 6 days of preparation and tested by culture method; the positive isolates (n=7) were identified and their antimicrobial sensitivity against some antibiotics was tested. The isolates represent 4.6% of the total cultured 150 unit, distributed between these organisms: Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus spp and Escherichia coli and they showed to be affected very well by all the tested antibiotics except for Pseudomonas aeruginosa which was resistant for all except the antibiotic Ciprofloxacin and Escherichia coli which was resistant to both Cefaclor and Trimethoprim. According to these results, we recommend raising awareness among medical staff dealing with this problem despite their positions and effect in the working frame, because these findings need a high level of communication between the authorities and the medical staff.Also this study recommends authorities to apply quality control standards in platelet preparation and storage.