I guess I don’t understand how you are using the word “categorically”. Since these posts I’ve looked up, but it still hasn’t clicked.
But if you take “you” in your statement to mean the collective pool of eligible blood doners, then the issue of whether or not they run out would be moot, and your statement would be true. That’s how I think of the “you” they are aiming at - the public at large.
If I may paraphrase Yogi Berra, it seems like this comes down to your objecting to them saying something they didn’t really say.
It’s a normal practice, but they only tell the people who test negative. My son is negative, but I’d never have learned that I had the antibodies if I hadn’t heard them telling him and asked. So if you haven’t been told, you’re probably positive. It might be on your donor card.
All adults are assumed to have been exposed to the virus unless they’re tested otherwise. It doesn’t come from cats, at least not particularly. It spreads well enough through humans. It also doesn’t make adults or small children sick, at least not sick enough that it’s noticed particularly.
Oh, and they only tell the folks who test negative because they want to encourage them to donate. Although just because his blood could be used for a premie, doesn’t mean that it will be used for a premie. You can’t schedule when a premie will be born, so you need to have the blood available even on days when it’s not needed.
If your region still has a paper BDR (blood donor record, the paper that you sign every time), your CMV status is on it. I don’t know yet about the regions that have gotten rid of the form because my region doesn’t go up on the new system until next month. You can try calling 1-866-236-3276 for an answer.
It’s tied to your donor ID, so the info (along with blood type and any useful extra typing) stays with your “file.” Stuff is rechecked, though.
As for patients dying for lack of blood, it’s often hard to say. Often, transfusion keeps them from bleeding out before the doctors can fix what’s wrong. Sometimes blood types can be switched up (giving O to a B patient, or moving to Opos instead of Oneg in an emergency), but i’ve seen several situations where we absolutely could not get any more of certain types from our Red Cross supplier, because there wasn’t enough to go around. Elective surgeries were canceled until the supply got better, and we had to conserve what we had in case of an emergency. We were lucky and didn’t run out, but we did switch several males to Rh pos temporarily, and may have caused them to develop antibodies.
In general, platelets are the hardest to come by, because of their short shelf life. While I can’t tell you for sure that a delay in getting platelets killed any of our patients, it’s certainly conceivable that it was a contributing factor in some cases.
It’s not always emergencies, though. More often, we’re talking about an infusion of platelets or red cells for chemo patients, which is more life-sustaining than life-saving. Does that still count, as far as saving a life goes? Giving someone another month to spend with their kids? Your blood goes into a pool, and some lives are saved through the existence of that pool. Does it matter if it’s emergencies or not?
As far as the “whole blood” thing goes, donated units are always split into components these days in the US and Canada. The only whole-blood transfusions I’ve ever seen were autologous units that people donated for themselves prior to an orthopedic surgery. The donor units get split into red cells and plasma/cryoprecipitate , and rarely into platelets. Platelets are mostly collected via apheresis these days, so a transfusion is equivalent to 6-8 units without having to expose the patient to multiple donors. Some places still do single units, but I think that’s getting very rare.