Evidence that M.E. isn’t contagious?

There appear to be organizations like the Scandinavian Donations and Transfusions database (SCANDAT) that do these kinds of studies:

No evidence of transfusion transmitted sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: results from a bi-national cohort study (2020, Transfusion)

 

That's a clever idea but in the UK at least, PwME aren't allowed to donate blood:

 

Yes, it'd have to be somewhere that does allow it. The US does, but I'm not sure there's a good enough connection in the US between the blood donation organization Red Cross and patient health records to study it.

I was wondering about the Scandinavian system that did the study above, but apparently as of 2010, Norway doesn't allow pwME to donate as well. Not sure about Sweden.

Edit: Oh I think that organization SCANDAT is just for Sweden and Denmark. Not sure if either of those countries ban pwME from donation.

 

In the light of small studies showing blood components from people with ME/CFS negatively affecting cells taken from healthy people, I'd imagine no one would want to take the risk.

They might be small studies, but until someone redoes them and fails to replicate the effect, surely it has to be considered potentially unsafe.

 

I don't mean a study that asks people with ME/CFS to donate. I mean just looking at health records in places where transfusions from donors with ME/CFS are already happening.

 

I’ve tried to look into this in Norway previously. You can’t donate if you are sick or feel sick. There are other rules as well, but no exemptions from those two.

 

Maybe something a bit different to this could be done in any country: look at new incidence of ME/CFS in both donors and recipients after the transfusion. It's possible there's something in the blood that increases the risk of ME/CFS, so maybe those who receive blood from people who go on to develop ME/CFS are more likely to also go on to develop the condition.

I'm not sure there'd be enough incentive to undertake that study, but maybe it'd be worth it to trawl for associations of new incidences of any conditions between donors and recipients: cancer, autoimmune, neurodegenerative, etc.

 

Could the pattern that the systems that have tracked it and know in future a recipient could track it back ie legal case possible have banned donations from pwme? Is that really where the answer hides?