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If a pregnant woman has never been exposed to CMV and has her first infection during pregnancy, there is a chance that the fetus could become infected before the mother’s body can eliminate the virus.

Transmission to the fetus only occurs in a third of women who have a primary infection during pregnancy. Congenital CMV is the most common congenital infection in the US. Twenty percent of babies born with an infection develop medical complications over the first few years of life. Those symptoms can include low birth weight, deafness, blindness, mental retardation, small head, seizures, jaundice, brittle teeth and damage to the liver and spleen. While a child may develop some of the above symptoms, no baby develops all the symptoms and some infants have no symptoms at all.

You may wish to consult with your own medical practitioner as to whether he or she feels it is acceptable to use a donor who is positive for CMV IgG antibodies.

Given our screening process, Fairfax Cryobank presumes that our donors who are positive for CMV IgG antibodies are non-infectious for CMV. Furthermore, our six-month quarantine policy ensures that should a donor test positive for a current or recent infection, we would destroy all his potentially infectious samples before they were ever released to recipients.