Domestic and international experts met in Shanghai Tuesday for the launch of the first guidelines in China for Haemovigilance (HV), a system of oversight for blood transfusions that aims to improve the safety of the country's blood supply.

The guidelines, which were drafted by the Shanghai Blood Center and the Chinese Society of Blood Transfusion, set standards for a proposed Haemovigilance system in China.

"It is of vital importance to introduce the HV system in China," said Dr Zhu Yongmin, director of the Shanghai Blood Center.

An HV system watches over all activities along the blood supply chain from donors to recipients, said Dr Neelam Dhingra, coordinator of the Blood Transfusion unit of the World Health Organization.

Dhingra said Haemovigilance is essential to preventing adverse events and unwanted reactions from blood transfusions.

Transfusion-related risks include the transmission of HIV and hepatitis, said Dr Anuj Sharma, the technical officer from the WHO's regional office for the Western Pacific.

"Blood transfusion is not without risks," Sharma said at the conference.

Because China has such a large population and an ever increasing demand for blood transfusions, a single problem in the blood supply can have grave results, Zhu said.

However, Zhu pointed out that the government lacks a clear recognition of the country's current blood safety situation.

An HV system requires a nonpunitive environment so that the medical institutions that deal with blood transfusions do not worry about being punished for reporting a problem in the blood supply.

Zhu acknowledged that an HV system could take a long time to take off because it would require medical institutions to operate much differently than they do now.

Although some top-tier hospitals have begun to monitor blood transfusions, hospitals rarely trace the source of an adverse event unless a superior body orders them to do so, said a senior official surnamed Xie from the Shanghai Blood Center.

Sharma said that the HV system in France, which was among the first established in the world in 1994, has helped the country reduce the number of serious adverse events from blood transfusions, including patient deaths.