ALLOGRAFT BONE TRANSPLANTATION - A SHEFFIELD EXPERIENCE

There has been an increase in demand for allograft bone in recent year s. This type of bone provides an excellent material to fill in bony de fects, bur could be associated with an incidence of infection. Any new ly established tissue bank has to meet the very stringent criteria to process and store bone and maintain a donor and recipient database to avoid transmission of infection, The Sheffield Tissue Bank has been fu nctioning since 1989 and until 1993 has provided bone allografts to 22 0 patients; these have been used mainly to reconstruct defects at revi sion hip and knee arthroplasty and for scoliosis surgery,There have be en no cases of disease transmission and the rare of infection has been reduced by strict screening protocols. This paper outlines our experi ence, problems and success with human bone banking.