[Costs of safety of blood and blood products]

The safety of blood and blood components in transfusion medicine has become a very important factor. While diagnostic and therapeutic medical procedures need an increasing amount of special blood products, increasing demands on safety result in a reduction of blood donations. Considerable costs are caused by the requirement of self-sufficiency, additional assays to detect virus infections such as HIV, HCV and others, virus inactivation of blood and plasma, storing of plasma in quarantine, increase of autologous blood donation, and a great many of further steps to improve the safety in transfusion medicine. To obtain absolute safety, efforts are required that necessarily exceed the financial capacity of our health system. Because of budget limitations increasing costs of blood products will interfere with progress of other areas of health care. In addition ethical aspects of the use of funds have to be taken into consideration.