Blood screening to prevent post-transfusion hepatitis in Japan: effective for prevention as well as revealing for epidemiology of HBV and HCV infection in healthy subjects

Since 1968, when blood transfusion in Japan became dependent solely on voluntary blood donors and not on paid donors, Japanese Red Cross Blood Centers have successively introduced the most effective blood screening system for the time. Eventually, the incidence of post-transfusion hepatitis in Japan has been decreased to as low as 0.2–0.3% after 1992. In addition, as a result of the blood screening for hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis C virus (HCV) in more than seven million donors a year, we are getting ever increasing data on epidemiology of HBV and HCV infection among apparently healthy subjects in Japan.