New transfusion program for an intensive care nursery

We have established a new transfusion program for an intensive care nursery which is based on crossmatching several infants to the same unit of type O Rh0(D) negative packed red blood cells, dividing the unit into quadpacks, and allowing multiple entry into each quadpack over a 24-hour period in the nursery. With this procedure, each donor unit can be used to provide multiple transfusions to four infants over a four-day period. Follow-up of transfusion recipients revealed that 20% had evidence of previous or ongoing CMB infection at 10 months of age, a prevalence comparable to that for transfused infants in other studies. We found no evidence for transmission of HB infection and a low risk of allosensitization to red cell and lymphocyte antigens.