Blood transfusions cause "tens of thousands" of non-infectious adverse reactions in hospitalized patients annually and many of them are quite serious resulting in longer, more costly care, says Matthew J. Kuehnert, MD, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office of Blood, Organ, and Other Tissue Safety.

All of these can result in longer hospital stays, slower recoveries, and in a few very rare cases, death—reactions that some hospital officials may attribute not to the blood transfusion, but to the illness that caused the patient to be admitted in the first place. "We think that there's a lot of things that go wrong in blood transfusions that get misattributed," Whitaker says.

The rest of the story