27 August 2020 (Thursday) - BTLP-TACT Excercise

Time for another BTLP-TACT exercise: the software presented me with two cases

 

58098 – a  twenty-two year old female child in A&E requiring four units of blood following an RTA.

The dates of birth between sample and form didn’t agree, so I rejected them regardless of the urgency. That’s what the flying squad blood is for….

 

63906 – a ninety-two year old man attending orthopaedic outpatients requiring group & save.

The chap was O Rh(D) Positive with no antibodies detected.

 

I got the green light… It would be nice if whoever it is that programs the software could allow us to provide emergency O Neg units for the first case which might well have needed blood right away.

25 August 2020 (Tuesday) - Lablogatory Case Study

 

The nice people at Lablogatory sent a rather interesting article today “The Utility of Flow Cytometry in Establishing the Correct Diagnosis of a Rare Aggressive Lymphoma”.

This is the sort of thing I hope for when I sign up to an email mailing list. Lablogatory used to come up with this sort of thing quite a bit in the past. Here’s hoping they will continue to do so in the future.

But it is easy for me to hope that, isn’t it? Far more difficult to actually come up with it myself…

22 August 2020 (Saturday) - IBMS Newsletter

 

The IBMS sent their newsletter today. In the past I must admit I’ve been rather cynical about the IBMS, but they seem to be getting more relevant to me just lately. Certainly the IBS of the past would never be issuing statements about the future of Public Health England.

Should they be doing so? On the one hand the IBMS and all biomedical scientists should be professionally a-political. On the other hand if one has strong concerns that government policy is going to be severely detrimental to the nation’s well-being…

 

20 August 2020 (Thursday) - Transfusion News Update

 

 

The nice people at Transfusion News sent their update. Sometimes it is more relevant to me than others, but it is regular, and it is free… and I am very grateful for it.

 

Restrictive Transfusion Strategies Safe for Extremely Low Birth-Weight Infants

August 19, 2020 Most extremely low birth-weight (ELBW) infants develop anemia, which can result in severe brain injury and/or impaired oxygen supply to the brain. Some studies have suggested that liberal transfusion strategies may be best for ELBW infants, but RBC transfusions are also associated with [Read More]

Positive Coombs Tests and RBC Transfusions in Patients with COVID-19

August 12, 2020 During the early outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 in Italy, medical doctors and researchers observed a high frequency of positive direct antiglobulin tests (DAT, also known as Coombs test) in patients with COVID-19. They studied 113 hospitalized patients with COVID-19 during one week (April 6-13, 2020). All of the patients (mean age 63.5 years) received [Read More]