Blood Transfusions and Autoimmune Diseases

[Tina]

I had a blood transfusion six to seven years before what I call the onset of my ME/CFS. This was due to a delivery gone wrong. I had another child 21 months later. I was tired but I still feel it was in normal limits due to the fact that I was a mother with two young children. Other than being tired I had no issues until six years later when I was diagnosed with a uti and then a year after than pneumonia. Never the same again.

Effect on Recipient's Immune System

The transfusion of banked blood from a donor to a recipient is a liquid organ transplant. Through that transplant, the recipient's own immune system is altered for some period of time.[11] In the medical world there is debate in regard to how long and how important that immune suppression/alteration lasts; likely it lasts for weeks and perhaps up to years. In the last year we have learned that chimerism (multiple cell lines in the recipient trying to identify foreign cells from other sources) may well be responsible for some aspects of autoimmune diseases such as arthritis, lupus, and others.[12] What are the long-term effects of blending DNA in an individual and in a population? Blood bankers are constantly debating this issue. Only years of future research will tell us how important the effect of chimerism is on our human health.
https://www.medscape.org/viewarticle/567848