Madeleine Payne, Martin Gorsky, Colin J Sutherland, G Dennis Shanks
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Allied prisoners of war (POWs) working on the Imperial Japanese Army's railroad from Thailand to Burma during 1943-1945 devised a blood transfusion service to rescue severely ill fellow prisoners who were otherwise unlikely to survive the war. Extant transfusion records (1,251 recipients, 1,189 donors) in ledger books held by the United Kingdom National Archives at Kew were accessed and analyzed. Survival to the end of the war in 1945 was determined from Commonwealth War Graves Commission records. The records examined indicate that freshly donated whole blood was manually defibrinated and transfused after crossmatches based on POW medic sera. Overall survival to the end of the war was 74% in recipients and 88% in donors. Postwar survival rates were significantly higher for transfusion recipients with malaria (89.3%) than for other diagnoses: 52.6% for malnutrition, 59.3% for dysentery, 67.2% for skin ulcers, and 75.4% for other causes (odds ratio: 3.97; 95% CI: 2.79-5.28; P <0.0001). By 1945, the vast majority of blood transfusions were given for severe anemia caused by chronic relapsing vivax malaria. Although the POW situation was admittedly extreme, our data provide evidence that blood transfusions to treat severe anemia were associated with higher survival among patients with Plasmodium vivax infection than among those with other morbidities.
期刊介绍:
The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, established in 1921, is published monthly by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. It is among the top-ranked tropical medicine journals in the world publishing original scientific articles and the latest science covering new research with an emphasis on population, clinical and laboratory science and the application of technology in the fields of tropical medicine, parasitology, immunology, infectious diseases, epidemiology, basic and molecular biology, virology and international medicine.
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