The Mid-Western Health Board is recalling 715 patients for blood-group testing follo wing the discovery of a fault in a testing kit supplied to the regional hospital's blood bank in Limerick.
Dr Mary Cahill, a consultant haematologist, said a £6,000 order of kits had been recalled by a US pharmaceutical company which she declined to name. The manufacturer has also recalled similar kits used for determining blood-group types, although no problems have been reported with these.
Dr Cahill said a number of false positive readings on antibody-specific tests were detected through comparisons with negative readings on a different confirmatory test. The manufacturers had reported similar problems with the same production batch in Britain.
She said there was no health risk involved and the problem had been detected at an early stage. About 2,000 patients were tested using the suspect kits between February 22nd and April 13th but 1,285 of them do not require a further test because their blood groups were recorded on a previous occasion.