title: International rare donor panels: a review.
abstract: International rare blood donor panels or registries are important in the consistent availability of rare blood for patients who need this scarce resource. In countries where it has been possible to commit resources to this effort and often where the need is great, donors have been entered into a registry. The ISBT leadership recognized the importance of this very challenging inventory management activity and created a Working Party to support it. Individual countries support the WHO International Rare Donor Panel by submitting their donors' phenotype or genotype information to be catalogued into the database. It is extremely important that this database be cultivated and grown. The contributing countries keep their list updated and supply the blood product as they can when requested. It is known that some blood types are extremely scarce worldwide and requests for these are particularly difficult to fulfil. Thus, it is important to have a protocol to identify and recruit donors with rare blood types. It is equally or perhaps more important to ensure that the patients who need the rare blood are being managed appropriately in the presence and absence of rare blood products being available.
authors.affiliation: IRL, Biomedical Services, American Red Cross, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nance
authors.affiliation: Institute for Transfusion Medicine and Immunohematology, Red Cross Transfusion Service of Baden-Wuerttemberg-Hessen gGmbH, Baden-Baden, Germany.
authors.forename: E A
authors.initials: EA
authors.lastname: Scharberg
authors.affiliation: The International Blood Group Reference Laboratory, NHS Blood and Transplant, Filton, Bristol, UK.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Thornton
authors.affiliation: National Blood Services, Ramat Gan, Israel.
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Yahalom
authors.affiliation: Blood Group Unit, Finnish Red Cross Blood Service, Helsinki, Finland.
authors.forename: I
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Sareneva
authors.affiliation: New York Blood Center, Laboratory of Immunohematology and Genomics, Long Island City, NY, USA.
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lomas-Francis
mesh_terms: D001782:Blood Donors; D001788:Blood Grouping and Crossmatching; D001803:Blood Transfusion; D016208:Databases, Factual; D006801:Humans; D007390:International Agencies / Q000458:organization & administration*; D007518:Isoantibodies / Q000097:blood; D012042:Registries; D014944:World Health Organization / Q000458:organization & administration
chemical_list: D007518:Isoantibodies
keywords: IBGRL; ISBT; WHO international rare donor panel; international collaboration; rare donor programmes; rare donors