A co-worker of mine is not allowed to donate blood for reasons she doesn’t necessarily agree with, and has been trying to convince the doctors that she should be allowed to donate. Disregarding the question of whether the reasons she isn’t allowed are valid or not, and assuming her blood is “OK” to use for donations, I’m wondering what the costs of not accepting her donations are, or how much her potential donations are missed. Is there always enough blood on hand in America* or are there times when enough is simply not available? Could refusing her donation realistically cost someone their life?
*I say America since that’s where the donations would be made, and I’d assume that blood wouldn’t be sent out of the country. If U.S. blood donations are potentially sent to other countries as well, I’d be interested to know that too.
Although the answer to your question may vary from one region to another, I don’t think that there were ever any blood shortage issues at the blood bank I worked at in the midwest for 6 years. While we actually exported a large volume of blood to other blood centers across the country, a signficant portion of our blood supply would routinely get discarded as it was only good for a limited period of time. In fact, we had a record number of donations on 9/11/01, yet we ended up having to discard 100% of the red blood cells from that day (nearly 1000 units of blood). Since many centers across the country also had huge inventories, there was no one to export the blood to.
When a pint of blood is drawn, it is later separated into various components (red cells, plasma, platelets, etc.), each of which has a different use and shelf life. We tended to use probably 80% of the platelets in out inventory while over 95% of our plasma was used since most of it got sold to pharmaceutical companies. But red blood cells were only good for about 42 days, I believe, although this could have changed since 2002 when I last worked there.
Here are two previous threads in which we discussed this issue. Do not lie when you donate blood. You do not know more than the people who determine the rules about who can donate blood. They get enough blood and they would change the rules if they really needed the blood:
Can someone provide a breakdown of how blood is typically used? Such as,
x% thrown away and not needed
y% used in a patient
z% used for research
berff gave some numbers but I was looking for something a little more official. He/she also mentioned a significant portion was thrown away. That just kind of raises my eyebrow because every blood donation center I have ever seen ALWAYS says they urgently need your blood. And I always give it when I can, and in fact shortly after giving one time I got so sick I thought I was going to die. Running almost a 105 fever and in the emergency room they told me I had a “blood disease” gave me a shot and I got better in a day or so. Just kind of makes me wonder if they indeed are throwing away a significant portion why it’s so urgent I donate all the time.
How do they actually discard the blood? Surely they don’t poor it down the sink.
I’ll tell you my story from a recipient’s view. I was in a near fatal accident several years ago requiring massive amounts of blood transfusions.
10 months later, I received a call from my doctor to come to his office ASAP. I was told that one of the units of blood had come from a donor who had just tried to donate again and came up HIV positive.
All recipients of his blood for the last year needed to be tested for HIV.
I did come up negative.
He was donating blood and lying about the fact he was in a high risk group.
DON’T lie, they know why your blood won’t be accepted and you may endanger someone.
It really depends on your location. I know in Las Vegas the supply gets low during turiost season as we are supporting the need for a larger transient population. With more people comes more accidents, and more blood needs. Now saying that I only remember once in the last 15 years where it was reported that due to the lack of blood that the hospitals were postponing elective surgeries for a few days.
I’m a regular blood donor and I am aware that a lot of the blood isn’t used. I understand that they need to always have more than they would need under normal circumstances in case of emergency. When they say that supplies are low, it probably usually means that they’re below the amount that they need should an large disaster happen later in the day.
In large centres, the red cell discard rate is something like 3-6% (Canadian numbers) assuming you have a bunch of hospitals affiliated with you and you can juggle your inventory for maximum effect.
Smaller places, such as where I am, have a discard rate of ~50%. Which can’t be helped unfortunately.
FUN FACT: Every unit of blood costs around $370 to produce.
Sorry for providing anecdotal evidence in GQ, but we have blood drives at work scheduled every eight weeks or so. Seems like every time the next blood drive comes around, they are trying to get as many people signed up as possible because the blood supply is “critical” (about one or two day’s supply).
(FWIW, they’re back this week and I have an appointment. Starting on my fifth gallon!)
This is from the UK, but I can’t imagine the basic idea is all that different. But basically, it’s not that there’s usually a “shortage”, as such, but the system relies on a regular stream of donations. There will never be a time when the blood bank will say “Well, actually, we’ve got quite a lot of blood at the moment, so there’s no need to come in and donate.”
Oh, and just in case no-one’s mentioned this before - do not lie
In Canada at least, I often get faxes from the Canadian Blood Services in Ottawa saying how they only have a 2 day inventory of O- to meet current demand. This means that they can only meet hospital ORDERS for the next 2 days, not necessarily that all this blood is being used. Hospitals understandably want to have extra O- on hand in case the shit hits the fan and so some tend to over order. CBS will then start short filling orders and that’s when you can hear radio announcements re: ‘need blood donors’ or some such. I hate throwing out expired O-, but I’d hate more to have some guy need blood and us not having any.
I am confused. How do you incinerate a liquid? Do they boil it until there’s no more liquid? What would be left?
I had surgery some time ago and when I came to the nurse was like how do you feel, blah blah, and I quickly blurted out “what do you do with the limbs that you cut off during surgery?” She was somewhat taken aback, and I don’t remember getting the answer. Obviously they burn them, but when drugged it seemed like a reasonable question to ask.
At our center, we threw all expired/contaminated bags of blood into biohazard boxes which were double bagged with thick plastic biohazard bags. Once the box was filled up, we’d tape it up and add it to the stack we had in the garage. Twice per week, a large truck would pull up, load up all the biohazard boxes and incinerate them (off site). We would average probably 20-30 boxes per week but that would also include used needles, gloves, tubes, empty bags from when we made a platelet pool, etc.
I confess to not being any sort of expert on these matters. But I would presume that in an incinerator, the liquid part of the blood product would boil away and the solid part would burn.
I agree that you shouldn’t lie just on general principle. But that principle has nothing to do with knowing less than the people who make the rules, since some of the rules are beyond ridiculous to anyone with half a brain or common sense.
That’s pure bunk and very similar to the 'if I wore my seat belt I would have been killed" stories. One anecdote does not a scientific principle make. The anecdotes you are ignoring are from all the people that aren’t in any high risk group, don’t lie, think they are clean because they aren’t in a high risk group, but are infected unknowingly nonetheless.
The truth is, donating blood is like having sex. By creating (some of them) arbitrary “risk groups” based on stereotypes to avoid you lull yourself into a false pretense of safety. It’s best to assume that all of your partners are infected and wear a condom - similarly, it’s best to assume that all donators are potentially infected and test the blood to be sure. Using ‘risk group’ avoidance is potentially a valid method for keeping costs and waste low, but it should never be confused as a valid method for safety of the blood supply!
In case you forgot, being “Haitian” used to be considered “high risk”. It’s not any less a risk now for HIV, it’s just less politically correct to exclude Haitians arbitrarily. Hopefully other arbitrarily stereotyped risk groups will get a similar reprieve in the future. And that they will add more intelligent risk groups that aren’t currently factored in.
