International rare donor panels: a review.

International rare blood donor panels or registries are important in the consistent availability of rare blood for patients who need this scarce resource. In countries where it has been possible to commit resources to this effort and often where the need is great, donors have been entered into a registry. The ISBT leadership recognized the importance of this very challenging inventory management activity and created a Working Party to support it. Individual countries support the WHO International Rare Donor Panel by submitting their donors' phenotype or genotype information to be catalogued into the database. It is extremely important that this database be cultivated and grown. The contributing countries keep their list updated and supply the blood product as they can when requested. It is known that some blood types are extremely scarce worldwide and requests for these are particularly difficult to fulfil. Thus, it is important to have a protocol to identify and recruit donors with rare blood types. It is equally or perhaps more important to ensure that the patients who need the rare blood are being managed appropriately in the presence and absence of rare blood products being available.

Linkage and association study of FcgammaR polymorphisms in celiac disease.

The Fcgamma receptor cluster on chromosome 1q23 contains a number of genes that may affect susceptibility to celiac disease, but previous studies have yielded contradictory results. We studied the FcgammaRIIa*A519G (rs1801274) and FcgammaRIIIa*A559C (rs396991) single nucleotide polymorphisms in celiac disease families from Hungary and Finland and in celiac disease case-control materials from Hungary and Italy. Neither the Hungarian nor the Italian case-control material or a meta-analysis of the combined case-control material showed significant single-marker or haplotype association. In addition, neither linkage nor family-based association tests showed evidence for association in the Finnish or Hungarian family material. This study thus does not support a previous publication showing FcgammaR association with celiac disease.