Blood donation

Another aspect of blood donation and American Red Cross could be mentioned here. I hesitated earlier when ARC was called out as a less than ideal charitable organization. Did not want that to appear as an easy excuse to not consider blood donation.

There was a large increase in blood-donation rates after 2001/9/11 without a corresponding local demand. Some number of collected and tested 'units' were wasted. You can read 300,000 100,000 or 'very few' (!). Fact remains that this processing pipeline is not well designed to match supply and demand at large scales. 9/11 was not the first major mismatch either.

We also read that UK, because of madness of cows, meets blood demand by imports (all or most). Thus they have some system in place, but in general international blood transfers do not appear as a smoothly running machine. Local demand increase and local supply increase mismatches are not ameliorated by international transfer.

This would require planning, cooperation and trust. So perhaps not a sensible goal? One barrier that does not exist is high-speed transport. In this world you can get lobster or fresh-cut flowers anywhere. The day after. Just call.

Yet another rant, but I do not apologize. All persons donating blood deserve to have confidence that it will provide intended benefits. To someone, somewhere. If 'the system' (which is much larger than ARC) does not provide this confidence it serves all of us inadequately.

 

I emphatically agree. What is missing is response to dynamic events, which would require policies worked out in advance.

 

There were several other similar problems around the same time. Blood screening got behind the curve especially with regard to two viruses.

Contaminated haemophilia blood products - Wikipedia

 

Summer vacation example:

American Red Cross offering gift cards, incentives to bring in b - WDRB 41 Louisville News

 

Where things get bad enough blood-transfer activities just shut down

Yemen's blood bank faces threat of closure within days | Yemen News | Al Jazeera

I think this must be pretty rare.

 

Maybe some folks are indecisive about donating blood for being unsure about the questions to be asked part. You have to walk in the door to see those questions right? No, you can download from

http://www.aabb.org

or read attached pdfs

 

Blood types are part of general education, but readers may have let all that information float on past. It contains some interesting aspects though.

O negative blood is universal donor, thus in high demand. If you are O negative I presume you would have been 'hustled' for blood donation. But the flip side is that O negs can only receive O neg blood. So hospitals etc. might wish to deploy their O neg stocks for all customers through the door. But they really can't because next car wreck may have an O neg on board. And there is an obvious desire to keep them alive. For later hustling.

AB positive blood is the opposite. Can tolerate transfusion from anybody, but whose donation can only go to another AB neg. Err in that (blood typing in general) and recipient is in a world of big hurt.

O neg populations vary across countries from 0.1% (Philippines and Taiwan) to 9% (Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Spain). Almost 2 orders of magnitude. this must matter for strategies at country level.

+++

A 'liberal globalist' message is that all humans are one. Yeah OK fine but there are really eight. O A B AB and Rh pos or neg. Ironically you can't tell by looking. But get 'those races' wrong and somebody's blood will turn to aspic.

 

useful@78. You'll thank me less after hearing it was as antidote to useless @76.

But see, I want global blood transferals to work as well as they can. Having self invested more than a bit in that system. But here is PriusChat and I am obliged to dress topics with clever anecdotage. Along the way, some others might read and chose to add their arms to this most human enterprise.