How Safe is Our Blood for Transfusion: HIV P24 Antigen Among HIV Negative Blood Donors in Benin City

Abstract

The use of HIV antibody-based test for screening of blood donors is sub-optimal. Although HIV antibody test offers the advantage of simplicity and cost effectiveness, it is less perfect because of the possibility of transfusing blood in their window phase of HIV infection. This work is aimed at determining the prevalence of HIV P24 antigen among HIV antibody negative donors in Benin City, South-South Nigeria.  A total of 315 prospective blood donors who were sero-negative for HIV using both Determine and Uni-GoldTM test kit were screened again for HIV p24 antigen using BIORAD GENSCREEN ultra Ay-Ab ELISA kit.  The prevalence of HIV p24 antigen among the 315 HIV sero-negative blood donors was 11 representing 3.49%. Out of the total 315 donors, 218 representing 69.2% were males while 97 representing 30.8% were females. There was no significant difference in the HIV p24 positivity between the male 07 (3.21%) when compared to the female 04 (4.1 2%) donors (p = 0.9403). There was no significant difference when different age brackets were compared (p = 0.8262). Also, there was no significant difference when the different ABO and Rhesus blood groups were compared (p = 0.0648 and 0.8028). However, there was a significant increase in HIV P24 positivity in family replacement donors when compared to the voluntary donors (p = 0.003).There was significant increase in HIV P24 antigen in blood for transfusion and this increase were observed more in family replacement donations than voluntary non-remunerated blood donations.

Keywords: Blood donors, HIV, P24 antigen