If You Are Having Surgery
If you have a surgery that removes tissue from an organ or joint, such as a gallbladder or a knee replacement, the harvested tissue can be donated to this research program. Registered donors will complete an authorization and eligibility screening prior to surgery. Based on a collaboration with MyLymeData, medical history provided to MyLymeData can be paired with the tissue sample if the donor chooses this. More information, and appropriate forms for tissue and/or organ donation for Lyme disease research can be found by visiting NDRIs Private Donor Program website or by calling 800-222-NDRI , Option 5.
Chronic Neck Back Hip Or Spine Pain
Common back problems such as sprains, strains and aches may not interfere with a bone marrow donation. However, you are not able to join if you have on-going, chronic, significant pain areas of the neck, back, hip, or spine that:
- Interferes with your daily activities AND
- Requires daily prescription pain medication OR
- Requires regular physical therapy OR
- Requires regular chiropractor treatments
If you have significant back problems and/or any questions regarding your medical condition, contact your local donor center.
Could A Blood Transfusion Transmit Lyme Disease
Researchers now know that the tick-borne disease Babesia can be transmitted unknowingly through blood transfusions. But what about transfusion-associated Lyme disease? The risk is unlikely, but it is a concern worth considering, writes Pavia and Plummer.
Studies have found Borrelia burgdorferi in the blood of patients with early Lyme disease using culture tests.
Borrelia are likely to be found circulating in the blood sporadically or they may persist for a time period ranging from 2 to 5 weeks and in some cases beyond this time frame, writes Pavia, citing a 2001 study by Wormser and colleagues.
It is unlikely that an individual will donate blood if they have had a tick bite, erythema migrans rash or were ill, the author writes. But there could be donors who are unaware they have Lyme disease. They may not have seen a tick bite or EM rash and may be asymptomatic and not exhibiting any symptoms of the disease. This, in turn, would pose a theoretical risk.
After all, researchers have shown that it is possible to transmit B. burgdorferi spirochete in mice.
B. burgdorferi can be transferred from spirochetemic donor mice to naive recipients during an experimental blood transfusion that closely mimicked typical human blood transfusion procedures, according to a study by Gabitzsch.
Investigators, however, do not know if transmission can occur if the blood is stored under blood-storage conditions.
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Weight Height And Sex
Your ability to give blood will depend on your weight, height and sex. You can check your eligibility to give blood online.
Are you transgender? Being transgender is not a reason to prevent you donating. A deferral period may apply for some transgender individuals. Read more at www.rodekruis.be/transgender.
Lyme Rash And Diagnosis
The best-case scenario involves you seeing a tick on your body, pulling the tick off your body, and saving it in an airtight container. And after you develop a circular rash, your doctor can be confident your symptoms are that of Lyme disease.
Your doctor can then immediately start you on a strong dose of antibiotics to fight the Lyme infection and eliminate it from your body before it starts to spread. Ideally, this takes place within the first few days of developing a Lyme rash.
This does not happen for many, however.
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Can I Donate Blood
Donating blood is easy and our blood supply relies exclusively on the generosity of volunteer blood donors. There is no substitute for human blood. Most people qualify as a volunteer donor, even if they are taking medications. Review the eligibility criteria below and see if you can be a lifesaver too.
For information about blood donation and the Covid-19 vaccine, visit the Covid-19 and Blood Donation FAQ.
Age Matters
You may donate if you are at least 17 years old , weigh at least 110 pounds, and be in good health.
- Donors age 16-18 are also subject to additional height/weight restrictions.
- Donors age 76 and older can continue to donate blood if they meet all eligibility criteria and present a physician’s letter allowing them to donate, once at the first donation after reaching their 76th birthday. In the absence of a letter from their physician, they must be cleared by an NYBC medical director at each donation.
16 Year Old Parental/Guardian’s Permission Form
New York
7 days after taking See full list of medications that may affect your eligibility as a blood donor.
* These anti-platelet agents affect platelet function so people taking these drugs should not donate platelets for the indicated time however, you make a whole blood donation. Anyone taking Coumadin must wait 7 days after their last dose in order to be eligible for any type of donation.
Permanent Reasons
Please do not give blood if you:
Please Note:
Organ Or Tissue Transplant
If you have received human tissues, such as bone , ligaments, tendons, skin and corneas, you may be allowed to donate, depending on the reason for the procedure.
If you received any of the following types of transplants you will not be able to donate:
- Human organs such as heart, lung, liver or kidney
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What To Eat Before Donating Plasma
Drinking plenty of water and eating a balanced, healthy diet is always a good choice, but its even more important on the days leading up to plasma donation. Make sure to get a good nights sleep before the day of your donation. Drink about 6 to 8 cups of water the day before and day of donating, and eat a protein- and iron-rich meal within 3 hours of donation.
High-protein foods include beans and legumes, beef, chicken, shrimp, cheese, eggs, milk, yogurt , and seeds and nuts. Broccoli, beef, beans, iron-enriched breakfast cereals, chicken, ham, dark leafy greens, raisins, and watermelon are all high in iron.
Avoid fatty foods like French fries and other fried foods, pizza, or sweets the day you donate, and dont drink alcohol the night before. These can affect your blood tests and prevent you from donating.
Get An Accurate Diagnosis
To get an accurate diagnosis, you must first find the right doctor specializing in Lyme disease. Do the research and look for a doctor who has extensive knowledge, licensure and certification, and a high success rate working with patients.
This doctor may not be in the United States. One of the most well-renowned infectious diseases clinics is Lyme Mexico.
You may be thinking you cant travel to Mexico for help, but you can. You can spend the same amount of time and money visiting multiple doctors near your home without results. Or, you can meet with a top expert in Lyme disease and receive the treatment that gives you back the life you deserve.
Lyme literate doctors have modern and more aggressive treatments to help heal your Lyme disease. Lyme specialists not only know about more aggressive treatments, but they also provide them in their clinics on an outpatient basis.
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Lyme Disease Frequently Asked Questions
If you have not done so already, remove the tick with fine-tipped tweezers.
The chances that you might get Lyme disease from a single tick bite depend on the type of tick, where you acquired it, and how long it was attached to you. Many types of ticks bite people in the U.S., but only blacklegged ticks transmit the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. Furthermore, only blacklegged ticks in the highly endemic areas of the northeastern and north central U.S. are commonly infected. Finally, blacklegged ticks need to be attached for at least 24 hours before they can transmit Lyme disease. This is why its so important to remove them promptly and to check your body daily for ticks if you live in an endemic area.
If you develop illness within a few weeks of a tick bite, see your health care provider right away. Common symptoms of Lyme disease include a rash, fever, body aches, facial paralysis, and arthritis. Ticks can also transmit other diseases, so its important to be alert for any illness that follows a tick bite.
References:
Moody KD, Barthold SW, 1991. Relative infectivity of Borrelia burgdorferi in Lewis rats by various routes of inoculation.external iconAm J Trop Med Hyg 44: 135-9.
There are no reports of Lyme disease being spread to infants through breast milk. If you are diagnosed with Lyme disease and are also breastfeeding, make sure that your doctor knows this so that he or she can prescribe an antibiotic thats safe for use when breastfeeding.
Whats The Difference Between Donating Blood And Plasma
Plasma donation can be done more frequently than whole blood donation because a portion of the blood is returned to the body.
For some people, this makes plasma donation easier and less likely to cause side effects than whole blood donation.
And while there are generally no financial incentives for whole blood donations, private companies often pay donors for plasma donations.
This distinction isnt a hard and fast rule. But paying for whole blood donations isnt the industry standard.
The chart below outlines some of the major differences between whole blood vs. plasma donations.
| Whole Blood |
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How To Donate Plasma
Expect the plasma donation process to take 1 to 2 hours. If its your first time at the donation center, the initial paperwork and health screening may take longer. Depending on how fast the blood draw occurs, the actual donation part takes roughly an hour.
To donate, make an appointment at a reputable plasma donation center. If you arent sure where to go, check with your doctor or a local hospital for recommendations. Currently, there are more than 700 licensed and certified plasma collection centers in the US and Europe Licensing means that your donation will be executed by a trained medical professional in a highly controlled, sterile environment.
Where Do We Go From Here
We know that the most frequent tick-borne pathogens in the United States, B. burgdorferi B. microti , and A. phagocytophilum , are all transmitted by Ixodes ticks. Thus, anywhere you have Ixodes ticks in the world you will also have a risk of tick-borne diseases.
With Lyme disease being reported in nearly half of all U.S. counties and with Babesia following a similar pattern, the best thing for patients would be a universal blood screening for all tick-borne diseases. Because a universal test has not been developed, a reasonable starting point would be to begin nationwide year-round antibody screening for Babesia as recommended by the FDA in 2015.
At this point the best we may get is a compromise of screening blood donations from the five states where the incidence of babesiosis is highestConnecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. The FDA estimates this will reduce the risk of transfusion-transmitted Babesia microti in the blood supply by 95%. However, this will do nothing to mitigate the risk of contracting other species of Babesia.
Recently, the Rhode Island Chapter of the American Red Cross began screening blood donations for Babesia for the State of Massachusetts as a pilot program. They will be sharing data with the FDA as they move towards a larger program. Its a start.
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Tests We Carry Out On Your Blood
You may have noticed that each time you give a blood donation we also take blood samples.
These samples are used to perform a range of screening tests in our laboratories.
Most of these tests are mandatory, in other words we must carry them out on every single blood donation, whether this is your first donation or just one of the many you have given over the years.
However, there are some additional tests that may need to be done on some donations as necessary.
Sometimes the tests cannot be done, for example – if you give an incomplete blood donation or no blood samples are obtained, or if we cannot take a donation because of poor veins or you have low haemoglobin level for blood donation.
The tests play a very important role in ensuring that we provide a safe blood supply to patients. We test for your blood group, so that we can select the correct group for the patient.
We also test for infections that can be passed from donor to patient via a blood transfusion.
The tests are carried out by computer-controlled automated machines which can test many samples both quickly and easily, so helping us to get blood to the hospitals as fast as we can.
Any donation that is reactive on any one of the screening tests cannot be used. If your blood is reactive on any one of the screening tests, further tests are carried out to confirm whether the result indicates a true infection.
If the test results show that you can no longer give blood, then you will be given specific advice.
The Controversy Of Blood Donation
Admittedly, some tick-borne diseases can transmit to new carriers through blood transfusion. Lyme is not considered a threat for blood-transferred diseases. However, researchers see another potential reason to worry: an increasing growth rate, with up to 300,000 new infections each year.
Lyme disease occurs 6x as much as HIV/AIDS, but with Lyme research receiving less than 1% of the funding given to HIV research, there is simply not enough information on whether Lyme can actually present a threat. This information becomes even more confused when considering the different stages of the disease from its onset to chronic Lyme disease, or Post Treatment Lyme disease Syndrome .
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Register Now For Future Organ Donation
To make a difference in the future, please register now for our tissue program. All patients with Lyme disease are encouraged to register with Lyme Disease Biobank Tissue Program through our partner NDRI, and please also register with MyLymeData. Registering for the Lyme Disease Biobank Tissue Program through our partner NDRI as a future donor of post-mortem organs is critical, as it is rarely possible to evaluate how tick-borne disease may infect vital organs such as a persons heart and/or brain. By also providing information about your symptoms and medical history to MyLymeData, you can assist researchers in understanding the disease. More information can be found by visiting NDRIs Private Donor Program website or by calling NDRI at 800-222-NDRI , Option 5.
Why Doctors Get It Wrong
General practitioners are great at diagnosing and treating common ailments. Unless they are specialized in treating Lyme disease, though, they can make errors. They are not bad doctors they are just not properly trained in treating Lyme disease.
As mentioned, Lyme disease symptoms can mimic other diseases. Depression and Anxiety, Coronavirus or COVID19, the flu, Lupus, and many other ailments are known to make you feel aches and pains in your joints and bones, mental confusion, mood swings, and inflammation.
You can see how easy it would be for a non-Lyme disease specialist to accidentally misdiagnose, and therefore, mistreat your symptoms. You must find a Lyme literate doctor if you have developed a Lyme rash or simply think you may have the disease.
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Why Cant I Get Better Solving The Mystery Of Lyme And Chronic Disease: Solving The Mystery Of Lyme And Chronic Disease
From one of the countrys foremost doctors comes a ground-breaking book about diagnosing, treating and healing Lyme, and peeling away the layers that lead to chronic disease. You may not know that you have Lyme. It can mimic every disease process including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, autoimmune conditions like MS, psychiatric conditions like depression and anxiety, and cause significant memory and concentration problems, mimicking early dementia. It is called the Great Imitator, and inaccurate testing-combined with a fierce, ongoing debate that questions chronic infection-makes it difficult for sufferers to find effective care.
Stealth Characteristics Of Mycoplasma
Stealth microbes are a stronger force together than when alone. In other words, mycoplasma may not be a problem unless another stealth microbe is present. Lyme disease may be a good example of this phenomenon.
Mycoplasma is a common Lyme coinfection: Its present in 75% or more of Lyme disease cases. Mycoplasma is known to be carried and spread by ticks, but it is also possible that mycoplasma is already present in the body when a bite from a tick carrying borrelia the primary bacteria associated with Lyme occurs.
Immune dysfunction caused by the new tick-borne infection or possible other coinfection allows mycoplasma to proliferate and cause multi-systemic symptoms throughout the body. Many symptoms that occur in Lyme disease can be caused by mycoplasma, too.
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Mycoplasma: The Master Manipulator
Mycoplasma is a parasite, meaning it cant live without a host. And its the smallest of all bacteria: 4,000 of them can fit inside a single red blood cell in your body. By comparison, only 10-15 average-sized bacteria would fit in the same cell.
Unlike other bacteria, mycoplasmas dont have a protective cell wall, creating an interesting survival strategy: They can shape-shift and fit into areas where other bacteria cant go. For example, it also allows them to slip inside cells of the host. The lack of a cell wall makes mycoplasma resistant to some commonly prescribed classes of antibiotics like penicillins, which normally work by interrupting a bacterias cell wall so that when the bacteria divides, it falls apart.
More than 200 known types of mycoplasma can infect animals and plants. There are at least 23 different varieties of mycoplasma that can infect humans. A few of them are considered harmless normal flora, but most have the potential to cause disease.
Mycoplasma is spread by biting insects , sexual contact, contaminated food, and airborne droplets. Most everyone has been exposed to some form of mycoplasma. Several mycoplasma species have been closely associated with many chronic degenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis and Alzheimers disease, according to publications like the International Reviews of Immunology and the British Journal of Medical Practitioners, respectively.
- Nasal passages
- Vesicles inside the brain
- Synovial lining of joints