A hospital in New Hampshire has stopped giving type B and AB platelets to patients with type O blood because of a tick. New research published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that at US hospitals in regions where alpha-gal syndrome is common, type O patients who received B or AB platelets or plasma had nearly four times the risk of an allergic transfusion reaction compared with type O patients who received type O products.
The geographic qualifier is the finding. The same pattern did not appear at sites outside the United States, which points investigators toward alpha-gal rather than a general property of mismatched blood products.
