A blood supply shortage in the US has reached a “crisis” level, according to the American Red Cross, which says it is the second time in its 150-year history that levels have been this low.
Factors including wildfires and extreme heat have combined to create the current situation, Dr Courtney Lawrence, who works with the American Red Cross, told the BBC.
Supply levels dropped by a quarter just last month. The crisis has struck during summer, when the amount of blood needed by hospitals typically increases.
That is because of an increased number of car accidents and more people spending time outdoors, resulting in more injuries that require blood transfusions, Lawrence said.
They used it all trying to bring mcconnell back to life
Why would I donate blood so whoever can charge someone $25k to use it?
Oh my god dude just take some time off the internet.
You ever been to a hospital in the USA? Not even that hyperbolic of a comment.
Because it’s painless, barely takes any time, and can save a life.
I try to do it whenever I can, but sadly recently tats and piercings are a common disqualifying factor.
Yeah, it’s the right thing to do and paying for blood can contaminate the results and get very dystopian
Because ultimately it is needed to save someone’s life, and there’s no other way allowed to get it to them.
My mom is an ER nurse and she said a few times a year they get a batch of defective bags. You try to use them and they just burst, like they’re sealed wrong. So that sucks.
Too many vampires
There is too much microplastics in our blood now that not even vampires wanna touch that shit.
I’m o negative and I donated blood once. I shit you not, they called me hundreds of times after that. They called me once or twice a day for months.
I asked them to change my phone number, to remove my phone number, to please stop calling. I told them that I had died, that I’d taken up heroin as a hobby, that I’d begun having gay sex. They kept calling.
I will never donate blood again.
Oh no you’re slightly inconvenienced. The horror!
Fuck off. Constant spam calls are not a negligible inconvenience.
O negative is one of the most valuable blood types. So they obviously want it.
I understand that but if my reward for donating is my phone constantly ringing with calls from unknown numbers, which then use a recording to leave voicemails, which I have to dial in to delete, I’m out. My good deed has been sufficiently punished. I have learned from my mistake.
Supplies of every blood type are currently needed, but especially O positive.
Wouldn’t that be O negative, the universal donor?
O positive is the most common blood type, and apperently O-neg folk can handle O-pos once, so O-pos is generally the most commonly used for a crisis. Source: MD partner just checked openevidence Edit: O-pos is 40% of the population, O-neg is 6%, so they prefer to use O-pos. The real risk is just not having enough blood. Reading more, some 2019 source says only 1 in 2 million O-neg would die from O-pos blood. So really, almost everyone can use O-pos
TIL thank you for the education.
They’re just looking on the bright side, stop with the negativity. /s
isnt there still a shit ton of restrictions for people, making its extremely inconvenient, plus the sites that does the donations are very low in each city. like you have std, or taking medication, or had sex,etc.
even though they "soft-lifted the resitrction from gay men, there still potential for discrimination.
It’s wild, they do “batch testing” with samples from many different people in one go, and if anything turns up positive, they discard everyone’s donations. I used to donate plasma, but a batch test revealed somebody with hepatitis. I immediately went to a doctor to get tested and it came up negative. Unfortunately, due to having my sample in the batch test, I was already deferred from ever donating anything in the US again.
Random people have told me there are ways to get back on the donor list, but that’s not what I was told by professionals. So here I am, with perfectly fine blood, barred from donating because I happened to donate at the same time as somebody who was sick. Such a great system.
Donating blood can slightly reduce your amount of microplastics and PFAS since the blood your body makes to replace the donated blood will not contain those things.
I used to joke that the reason I donated was to reduce the microplastics in my blood. I feel so pleasantly vindicated now.
That’s if you consume non-contaminated fluids and solid foods, right?
Well, those things probably just accumulate in your body over time. So loosing some blood will reduce the concentration, even if you don’t avoid intake.
Donating has always been on my to-do list, but I just never made the time. I think I did it once 25 years ago in high school.
I finally made the time about a month ago, and they made it so easy I told them to keep a standing appointment every two months (the maximum.) Found out I’m O-, so I feel like I’m doing some real good.
If you’re O- you’re going to be begged to donate for the rest of your life now
An O- friend of mine donated blood ~10 years ago before learning he can get paid for plasma donations. 10 years of regular plasma donations (and no blood donations), he still gets monthly calls asking him to donate blood
Gotta make ends meet though. Free cookies and juice don’t pay rent
I thought that O- has undesirable plasma.
Oh well, for me at least, I feel good about the donation for donation’s sake.
Morally it’s better for O-s to donate whole blood than plasma. Plasma donation is great but it’s usually for developing medicines and prefers AB+, while whole blood is more likely to go to people in immediate need of blood and prefers O-.
I’ve done both and personally prefer giving blood to plasma. Plasma takes so much longer, has worse phlebotomists (they damaged one of my veins) and is just a generally more depressing environment
That said, if it’s all the same, give where the shortage is
If he’s getting paid for the plasma then it’s being used for research, not for donations, so they’ll still take it either way.
How much does he get for the plasma? That’s wild.
In my area you can make over $400/month selling your plasma.
That’s nothing to sneeze at.
How much does it impact your health if you do the maximum donation?
Can you still lift weights and get swole between donations or are you basically not able to exert yourself?
I’m not sure about plasma because I’m not a donor; I only know how much you can make in this area from coworkers who donate twice a week.
Back when I used to donate platelets, I definitely noticed that I wasn’t able to work out as hard and became fatigued more easily for a day or two afterward. I would usually eat a lot of beans and nuts, drink lots of water, and take a multi-vitamin right after my donation to help replenish my lost platelets. It’s likely something similar for blood plasma: lots of water, protein, iron/zinc/copper.
I can’t stomach the idea of “donating” blood only for it to be marked up and sold for thousands of dollars to those who need it.
Pay people and you’ll have your blood. Works for plasma centers.
Whole blood is not sold for profit, but organizations do charge hospitals a handling fee to cover operational costs… but I just realized as I was typing this that you aren’t talking about the organizations that collect blood, but the hospitals.
I looked up what it generally costs for a one-unit (1pt, ~470ml) blood transfusion, and it’s over $2000! I’d like to think that all the blood and platelet donations I’ve made over the years had saved lives, which objectively they probably did. But now knowing how much hospitals and insurance companies are profiting off of the act of donating makes it feel less like a selfless act of compassion and more like cattle being herded into a milking parlor.
Least they could do is give you a voucher to cover a future blood transfusion if you need it.
Whole blood is not sold for profit, but organizations do charge hospitals a handling fee to cover operational costs…
Domestically… Blood and blood products are America’s 9th largest export, and we export 70% of the world’s blood plasma supply. It’s nearly a 40 billion dollar business.
The orphan crushing machine strikes again.
Similar stuff happens with some charities too and the amount of money eaten up by administrative fees.
It’s sad but true.
As much as i know blood is needed, I haven’t given blood in years. If I got into a car accident on the way home they’d sell it back to me for an absurd rate. Fuck them.
If you give blood, you should receive blood for free if you need it.
That’s common sense.
We live in a dystopia, though…
Even though companies are making a profit off of it, donating blood is still so important. Not doing it because someone is profiting off of the donation only hurts the people who need the transfusion more. The laws surrounding profiting off of donated blood need to change, but the need for blood still exists.
but the need for blood still exists
Whose blood?
We donated blood (O+) at every possible interval to help the community and then when we were gay one of the doctors had to inform me that we marked down that we had sexual contact with another man not thinking about it. Even though we explained it was with a condom and we didn’t have any std, we asked what if we had sex with a woman? He said it wouldn’t have been an issue. Sheet that we were denied. Then we eventually came out trans and was sure that now we could probably get around it but alas that was also not allowed.
Never had an std, blood borne illness/disease, were fit as a fiddle blood/body wise (our disabilities do not affect that) and our bi yearly donation hasn’t been done in 8 or so years.
Hopefully now in EU they’ll let us donate blood again, we do care about people and the good we can do, even if it’s a little.
Edit: we can donate blood in Spain! Yippeeee!!!
In the US they’ve changed those questions.
Have they? What it saying now?
I used to donate platelets every two weeks, but I haven’t gone in a few years. The last time I went was beginning of 2024; at that time they still asked all the same questions.
If it’s still asking the same questions by then, then we wouldn’t have had the chance to see the new rules before moving.
Phlebotomist here! Our organisation does ask these questions, but it works more like a flow chart; essentially what we’re trying to rule out is if you’ve had anal sex with a new partner in the last 3 months, just because of the inherent risks there.
Condom use, while ideal on a personal level, is kind of a moot point where donating is concerned just because there’s no way for us to know that it was worn correctly, that nothing went away with it, etc.
Honestly having any sex with a new partner within 3 months and is given to everyone as a blanket question would be totally fine in my eyes, idk why anal itself has to be specified. Either way, better than what we were looking at before so it is progress :3
Literally all bad things lead back to trump… Severe cuts to federal funding sources that allowed for more drives, more personnel, offered incentives, funded training education programs to spread awareness. Head of the snake also lacks empathy and promotes the same in future generations.
Article says
“Supplies of every blood type are currently needed, but especially O positive.”
I thought O Negative was the universal donner.
Most donor blood is O+
O- is great because it is (almost always*) usable by anyone of any blood type, but only like 7% of people have it, so the overall supply is not very high and it’s typically reserved for emergencies and O- patients.
O+ can be given to most people because most people have O+ blood. Something like 30-40% of people have O+ and can thus receive O+ donations. All the Rh+ blood types can receive O+ blood too, which accounts for the vast majority of people. A+ is something like 25-30% of the population and B+ is like 10%. Altogether, O+, A+, B+, and AB+ make up probably about 75-85% of the population, and all of those people can receive O+ blood donations, thus the supply of O+ blood is the most-needed most of the time.
Obviously they also want as much O- as possible too. Hell, they want all of them all the time except AB type blood from females.
*Blood typing is actually a lot more complicated than A/B antigen and Rh factor, so some people with certain antigens need very specific donor blood or autologous blood that they donate themselves prior to a procedure or whatnot.
What is different about AB type from females? That describes me and I’ve almost earned my 2 gallon pin, the ladies in the blood mobile are always happy to see me.
AB type females can develop dangerous antibodies during pregnancy, and so even if you’ve never been pregnant (or think you’ve never been pregnant) there is still statistically an additional risk because there’s no good way to know for certain whether you’ve has ever been pregnant. The tests and screening for blood antibodies are expensive. Because of the heightened risk, taking AB positive female blood can be more expensive and complicated than it’s worth, so many blood banks just don’t actively encourage AB females to donate as often. There is still use for any kind of blood, even if it is used for research or if they use the RBC and waste the plasma. They certainly would never turn you away, but they also won’t regularly pester you the way they will an O- or O+ donor
AB+ male donor plasma is compatible with all blood types (universal plasma donor) and so they really want that. They call it liquid gold
I don’t know enough about blood banking specifically but it’s possible that there are some blood banks who have better capacity to screen any female AB plasma for HLA antibodies and so they don’t care as much. Idk. I just know as an AB+ female, my local blood bank was like “Don’t donate unless we tell you we need it”
Fascinating, cool to know, thank you. I will ask about it next time i donate.
I googled it and this is from blood.co.uk:
Plasma from AB negative donations can help treat patients of all blood types, however fresh frozen plasma is only produced from male donations. This is because female donors (especially those who have been pregnant) can develop antibodies that, while no danger to themselves, can prove life threatening to patients transfused with their plasma.
To avoid waste and to achieve the balance of plasma and red cells required by patients, we manage AB negative donations differently to other blood groups.
We encourage our male donors to donate as frequently as possible while asking female donors to wait to donate until contacted directly by us.
Interesting. Thank you for googling for me, I guess I could have done that. I’ll probably google a bit more and maybe add the info here just for infos sake, because this seems to be referring just to ab- and I’m ab+
Personally, I’ve never been pregnant, but it sounds like the antibodies might still be present even before pregnancy.
The bloodmobile/bank where i donate is ALWAYS desperate for blood, and I’ve never read or heard anything about this exclusion in my 17 years of donating, the only time I’ve ever been turned away is for low iron.
Oh it’s not exclusionary. They’ll totally still take your blood. It’s just in the lowest demand in general, and blood banks often tell AB females (both + and -) that they will reach out when they want/need blood donation, rather than telling those donors to come for donations as often as possible like they do for other donors. If you’re willing to donate, by all means keep donating. The blood banks can figure out what to do with it and all blood has its uses!
Great reply Thanks
Do they still refuse people who lived in Europe from 1980 (or 1981, I don’t remember the start year) on for fear of mad cow disease? I know someone who says they were there just a few months past the start of that window, and mad cow didn’t even make the news for nearly a decade after that. Red Cross was still refusing his donations last time he tried, despite not showing any signs of the disease in all this time.
Nope! I grew up overseas and they finally eased those restrictions a couple of years ago.
I can’t vouch for the Red Cross specifically, but the blood bank I work for has no issues with it anymore.
That’s the terrifying thing about prion disease. It can lay dormant for decades then just pop up and kill you. Might be tomorrow, might be when you’re 83.
I lived in Germany in the 80s and early 90s, and I can’t donate blood still
People who have donated blood or organs should get access to free blood and organ donations when they need them.
People who are on blood and organ donation lists should get priority access to blood and organs when they need them.
We should still try to take care of people who refuse to donate but they should wait behind the people who are contributing to the health of society with their own bodies.
What about people who can’t donate blood, or can’t do so without great inconvenience? Where do you draw the line for moral responsibility?
What about people who have a phobia of needles, suffered from medical abuse, or have adverse reactions to donating blood that makes them sick for a few days or weeks?
If we are talking about people who contribute to other’s health through their own bodies, does that mean every mother is at the top of the list because birthing a baby is a contribution to another’s health?
What about medical workers working 12hr shifts and completely wrecking their own bodies in the process? Is that a lesser contribution than someone who donates blood once a month? To go further, where would you put a factory worker with repetitive strain injury who makes the medical equipment that is essential to treating others?
If we want to allot the use of blood based on one’s contribution of their bodies, we have to first ask what it means to contribute. No donor lives in a vacuum. If you can donate blood, it means you are supported by circumstances that leave you in good enough health to donate blood.
I think a better solution is to pass a law requiring that blood donors receive a check equal to half of whatever the hospital charges the patient that receives the donated blood. As long as we’re going to have a for profit healthcare system, blood donors should be paid just like anyone else.
I agree in a high-level sense - people should be incentivised to give, and those who receive should not be charged. They shouldn’t necessarily be connected, though.
The incentives are all fucked up, you would need loads of exceptions, and it would introduce a whole lot of excess red tape for not much benefit to either side.
