RESEARCH Prevalence and prevalenc m o

Human blood is a major source of diverse medical pro-ducts that are used for the prevention and treatment of various life-threatening diseases. However, blood trans-fusion has been subjected to contamination with differ-ent human pathogens that may induce a wide variety of risk, especially transfusion-transmissible infections (TTIs) such as HIV, HBV, HCV and syphilis. Over the past three decades, the risk of TTIs has been dramatically reduced by the introduction of routine donor laboratory screen-ing of blood-borne pathogens [1,2]. In the EU and the United States, due to continuous implementation and improvement of more sensitive serologic methods and nucleic acid amplification test (NAT), the residual risk of viral transmission decreased in 2000 to less than 1: 250,000 for hepatitis C virus (HCV) and 1: 1.3 M for HIV [1,3]. By contrast, TTIs still pose a great threat to bloo