alt Hacker NewsMy girlfriend accidentally told the donation center she went to Mexico, and they banned her from donating for four years.
Apparently you'd only go to Mexico to eat brain tacos and share needles with cows. Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood.
Replies
Yes... travel, tattoos, drug use and sexual behavior can and should disqualify a person from donating blood.
I was banned roughly the same time for being in the US. I guess its mostly so they don't need to check for unexpected things.
> eat brain tacos
What's wrong with that? Animal brains are a common dish in many countries, including France, Asia, and parts of the United States
There are other ways she can donate her blood.
"Accidentally"? Implying she should've lied about it even though they probably have some reason (evaluating risk presumably) for asking?
Sounds like a wild party.
> Surely there's a better way to filter out risky blood
It's simple Bayesian probability. Blood tests have a relatively high error rate. Hep-B tests have a 6-12% false negative rate early in the disease, and Hep-C is 3-6% even later in the course of the disease. That's considered a "very low" false-negative rate for a blood test.
In Bayesian terms, blood tests don’t “screen” for a disease. They reduce the odds ratio of contaminated blood by a factor of 10 or so. But the ultimate odds still depends heavily on the prior odds—the prevalence of the disease in the donor population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prior_probability. Even with testing, you can reduce the risk of contaminated blood by drawing blood from a pool of donors that has lower prevalence rate of diseases.