Condition
Viral haemorrhagic fever, including Ebola and Marburg virus.
Separate guidance exists for Dengue Fever.
Individual at risk
Recipient
Guidance at RECRUITMENT for adult volunteer donor and maternal donor (cord blood donation)
Donors with a history of viral haemorrhagic fever should be deferred for one year following full recovery.
Donors travelling to a country with a history of epidemic Ebola or Marburg fever should be deferred for a minimum of eight weeks from return. In practice, such donors may have a longer period of deferral imposed due to the risk of malaria from travelling to those regions.
Guidance at CT/WORK-UP
Donors with a history of viral haemorrhagic fever should be deferred for one year following full recovery.
Donors travelling to a country with a history of epidemic Ebola or Marburg fever should be deferred for a minimum of eight weeks from return. In practice, such donors may have a longer period of deferral imposed due to the risk of malaria in those regions.
As with malaria, any travel made by the donor to a region with a risk of viral haemorrhagic fever should be reported to the recipient transplant centre.
Justification for guidance
The incubation period for Ebola is 2 to 21 days after exposure to the virus, although 8 to 10 days is most common.
For many registries and donor centres, the risk period for viral haemorrhagic fevers, including Ebola, is covered by a longer deferral period for malaria risk: all countries so far affected by Ebola and Marburg have endemic malaria risk.
However, some registries or donor centres do not defer donors on the basis of malaria risk, or may allow donors to proceed without a deferral period at the transplant centre's discretion: such centres should apply a minimum deferral of eight weeks after return from travel to a country with a risk of viral haemorrhagic fever, including Ebola and Marburg.
At the time of writing, there are two separate 2014 outbreaks of Ebola in Africa:
West Africa:
Liberia
Guinea
Sierra Leone
Central Africa:
Democratic Republic of the Congo
A healthcare worker in Spain caring for a repatriated missionary has been diagnosed with the first case of Ebola contracted outside Africa. There have also been travel-related cases reported in Senegal, Mali and the United States. There have been 2 further cases of locally acquired Ebola virus disease in healthcare workers the US.
In addition, the following African countries have also reported epidemic Ebola or Marburg at some point in the past, unrelated to the current outbreak:
Angola
Congo
Cote D’Ivoire
Gabon
Kenya
South Sudan
Sudan
Uganda
Registries are advised to consult the World Health Organisation website (http://www.who.int/csr/disease/ebola/en/) or the Centre for Disease Control (http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/index.html) for contemporary information on the 2014 outbreak.