I’ve been seeing a lot of Public Service Announcements lately for giving blood. And it got me to thinking.
Assuming a person has signed their organ donor card, and they die from say, a piano falling on them.
When they get to the emergency room and are considered certain to die, as they breathe their last breath, when they consider harvesting usable organs, does the blood get used? I mean, do they drain all the blood from that person for the blood bank, or is there a reason it’s unusable.
I’m guessing the average human holds about 5+ gallons of blood. Wouldn’t that go a long way to solving the continuous blood shortage?
When you give blood, you are asked many questions to keep the blood supply “healthy”.
Some of those are:
a) Have you recently had a tattoo?
b) Are you feeling healthy today?
c) Have you travelled in (any of several “at-risk” areas) in the past year?
etc…
I imagine it would be difficult to get satisfactory answers to all those questions in time to be able to “harvest” the blood from a corpse. And if you asked the corpse “are you feeling healthy today”, I can only imagine what the answer would be.
So anyway, I would imagine without the heart pumping to keep blood oxygenated it would not last very long. Also, without the heart pumping the blood, there is no pressure to force the blood into the bag.
One possible misunderstanding here: People whose organs are harvested aren’t “considered certain to die”, they’re braindead. They may not look the part, but they are dead, none the less. They look alive for a while with help from machinery, but eventually all functions will cease. (I don’t mean to lecture, but people sometimes get the idea that organ donors get less attention from ghoulish organ-hungry ER doctors, so getting the details right is important here…)
I’m not an MD, but AFAIK, organ harvest means disrupting the circulatory system in a big way (removing the heart comes to mind). What blood might be extracted afterwards would have only gravity to assist it.
And a WAG: Chemicals might be inserted into the bloodstream of an organ donor to help keep the organs viable ?
In the end, the lack of blood probably isn’t bad enough to justify the hassle. Voluntary donation is a much better image to sell to the public, no ?
So anyway, I would imagine without the heart pumping to keep blood oxygenated it would not last very long. Also, without the heart pumping the blood, there is no pressure to force the blood into the bag.
Anyone remember The Andromeda Strain (film not book)?
When they got to the town and there were people cut open but not bleeding they explained it quite thoroughly. Aside from shelf-life, blood tends to tettle into soft tissue really quickly when the heart stops pumping. Making it pretty much umpossible to extract blood from a corpse unless you puree the corpse and strain out the “chunky bits” to get the blood.
Anyone who has ever slaughtered small animals will tel you to hang them upside down prior to or immidiately after killing them to make sure the blood drains. Once that blood soaks into the tissue the meat is ruined.
Another consideration against use of cadaver blood might be that in an emergency situation, the trauma team will use drugs to help revive/stabilize the patient. This means everything from Ringers Lactate and D5W, to epinephrine, extracts of curare, etc. These agents would still be present at time of death, therefore contaminating the blood, and making it unsuitable for transfusion. This also assumes that the patient wasn’t on any number of drugs at the time, such has PCP and cocaine.
Not to mention that if a piano falls on someone, lots of interesting environmental stuff will get into the bloodstream. You don’t want to be using ivory-contaminated blood. You never know when the recipient has, through some bizarre set of circumstances, developed a set of anti-elephant tooth enamel antibodies, for instance.
First as Arnold has already said you would not use cadaver blood because you need to ask some questions about behaviour to ascertain quality and there is also the coagulation problem mentioned by andyman. Tests for various things including HIV and various forms of hepatitis have “window” periods where the disease is undetectable for a period of time (some of these can be destroyed by heat treatment though). This is why screening of donors by questionaire is still regarded as very important - it is the combination of testing and demographic screening which determines the safety of the blood supply. Cadaver blood has been used in the past, notably by Serge Yudin in the Soviet Union starting in the 1930s.
Generally people with anything wrong with them don’t give blood. Only healthy people give blood, so I would think hemophiliacs would be out. You might be able to donate your own blood so it could be given back to you.
When you recieve a unit of blood it has no functioning platlets in it. If you need platlets you get a bag of platlets.
Also, hemophilia is not a platlet disorder. Hemophiliacs have normal platlets. I’ve never heard of ‘mild hemophilia’ are you sure you have hemophilia?
The dying person’s blood, especially one seriously injured, is flooded with toxins from pain, bodily injury, and is under stress. It might be usable in an absolute crisis when there is no alternative.
The EMTs will also have administered medication, along with the ER doc, which cannot be in donated blood.
Blood banks won’t accept blood from people in various medications because it remains in the blood. That can cause problems later.
The closest they come to salvaging blood these days is recovering, filtering and re-infusing one’s own blood during surgery, especially during operations which are really bloody.
