Biovigilance has many different aspects that involve a variety of data collection methods, analysis and resolution. In the United States, biovigilance programmes are only now becoming centralized.

Coordinated safety and public health efforts are shared by various divisions of Health and Human Services agencies including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitor Library Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), with input from trade, academic, industrial and patient groups. In the US, the CDC has the primary responsibility for conducting national disease surveillance and developing epidemiological and laboratory tools to enhance surveillance. CDC’s emerging infectious disease working group

gathers information from multiple sources, including state health surveillance, Selleck MG 132 literature reports and reports from regulatory authorities worldwide. CDC shares information about pathogens that might affect blood products with relevant offices within the FDA, and other governmental agencies as appropriate, such as the Department of Defense. FDA assesses the risk of potential pathogen transmission by blood products and develops a risk mitigation strategy depending on the nature of the pathogen. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Healthcare Safety Network (NHSN) has worked with the AABB (formerly the American Association of Blood Banks), a trade organization, to develop a web-based

haemovigilance system that collects data from hospitals to detect adverse transfusion events such as reactions to blood products, process problems and medical errors. The information, collected using standardized MCE data collection tools, can be used to create benchmarks for trending purposes, provide opportunities for data-driven intervention, including validation, quality control and impact measurement. The first module of this programme, that became operational in February, 2010, is designed to collect information about recipients of blood product transfusions; a second module on blood donors will be implemented shortly. Other CDC surveillance programmes include the Universal Data Collection project to monitor the safety of the nation’s blood supply for persons with bleeding disorders being treated with blood products, as well as to monitor the occurrence of joint complications experienced by persons with haemophilia. CDC also has a programme to monitor for any emergence of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. The Food and Drug Administration has a number of different surveillance programmes for blood products that vary according to the type of product under scrutiny, e.g. blood components such as whole blood, cells or plasma, or manufactured products such as plasma derivatives.