Danno da emotrasfusione: responsabilità e prescrizione

Abstract

[Damage caused by blood transfusion and medical liability]

A wide scientific and jurisprudential literature is available on the issue of medical liability for damage by blood transfusion. National laws and jurisprudential guidelines had transposed the scientific development in term of preventive diagnostic techniques designed to minimize the risk of post-transfusion infections. For this reasons the Ministry of Health has issued several decrees to preserve patients from viral post-transfusion infections, avoiding compensation due to unpredictable transfusion damages. Particularly, by implementing all the methods provided by law, it is now possible to minimize the risk of infection, but it is impossible to cancel it. On the other hand, in the “so-called windows period” for viral infections, potential infective donors can’t be identified, although the recent molecular technique (PRC: polymerase chain reaction) has been applied for HBV, HCV, and HIV. This technique has been introduced in the nineties but applied only since 2000. Consequently an unappropriated transfusion therapy for wrong indication or a careless collection, analysis, and storage of blood, according to laws since 2000, remain compensable. Post-transfusion infections, which are impossible to identify for the sensitivity limits of analytical methods, are not compensable. Another important issue is the time-barred for the request of the damage: in this case, the prescription term doesn’t start since the time of infection, but since the time when the disease was perceived or it could be perceived as a post-transfusion damage. The purpose of this review is to provide an overview on the responsibility and the time-barred of damage caused by blood transfusion.