“It is now generally agreed that H.I.V. can be detected in the blood of an infected person within a matter of weeks.”
Weeks.
“Oops, sorry, seems the donor from a high risk group picked it up a few days before donating and tests didn’t detect it. Now you’re going to die of a painful slow expensive disease.”
This is what the FDA had to say on relying on blood testing:
"The window period when recent HIV infection might be missed using this testing strategy is approximately 9 days. Given this, it has been suggested that no donor deferral is necessary, given the relatively low likelihood that a recently infected individual would give blood.
"However, in the setting of the approximately 50,000 new HIV infections per year in the United States, conservative calculations performed by FDA estimate that this approach could potentially be associated with an approximately four-fold increase in HIV transmissions resulting from blood transfusions each year.
"Such a policy, increasing the potential for the transmission of HIV infection, is not aligned with maintaining or improving the safety of the blood supply in the U.S."