CMV status

[Vilanelle]

I am in the process of choosing donor sperm. I have not yet had my CMV results back so am limited in which donors to look at. Say I test negative for CMV would it still be ok to choose a donor with CMV status?

Fertility nurse said that donors who are experiencing a CMV flare up can not donate, and the freeze would kill the virus anyway.

However she advised against. What do people think?

We had the same question as we found that the majority of donors we looked at were CMV positive.
You would need to check with your clinic to confirm their guidelines (they may or may not accept it it) but ours told us they were happy for us to use a positive donor even though we’re negative, as the risk was negligible.
As it happened, we found a negative donor but would have considered a positive if we didn’t find the negative one.

I went to talk to my GP about getting tests done yesterday and asked about CMV. She said it's not routinely tested for here (and didn't put it on the list of what to test for) but said she'd always choose negative anything. I told her it cut down the donors and awful lot, but she still said she'd keep away from anyone who's positive.

When I was choosing I went for CMV negative on the advice of my clinic. I'd been tested as negative so they said although the risk is tiny they would go with negative. They also said if I was positive it wouldn't matter either way. However, I found that finding a donor who was CMV- and uk compliant was quite challenging. I looked every week for a few months before deciding on the donor as I wanted the right match for me as a single mum by choice.

I'm CMV negative and in the end, after reading all the info I could find on the subject, I decided not to worry about using a CMV negative donor.

The main reasons that reassured me that it was ok are that donors are checked at the point they donate for live virus and donations aren't accepted if they have live CMV, washing and freezing destroys viruses to some extent and the biggest transmitters of CMV are toddlers in their saliva so what's the point of going to the lengths of avoiding a CMV+ donor when it's a virus you could come into contact with anywhere . I also wonder whether some people are more immune to it than others given that I've spent a lot of time with young children so will have come into contact with the virus yet never contracted it.