Supply of blood for transfusion in the Caribbean and Latin American countries in 2005: Progress since 2005 of the Regional Plan of Action for Transfusion Safety

The situation of the national blood programs in 36 countries and territories before the approval of the Plan was summarized in the publication “Supply of blood for transfusion in the Caribbean and Latin American Countries in 2005. Baseline data for the Regional Plan of Action for Transfusion Safety 2006-2010.”

The present document contains the information officially provided to PAHO by the health authorities of the countries of the Caribbean and Latin America for 2006 and 2007. Unfortunately, PAHO did not receive official reports for 2006 from Aruba, Belize, Bermuda, Chile, Curacao, Guatemala, Honduras, Uruguay and Venezuela; and for 2007 reports were not submitted by Argentina, Aruba, Colombia, Curacao, Barbados, Bermuda, Uruguay and Venezuela. Furthermore, some countries provided incomplete data for either of those two years –in some cases only a proportion of the blood services in the country were included in the report, while in others full sets of data were missing for the country.

Under these circumstances it is impossible to assess the regional progress. It was decided, however, to present individual country summaries from 2005 to 2007, in order to allow identification of national trends in time.