SubscribeIn the business of supplying blood, Labor Day is the last hurdle of the donor-dry summer. We are in dire need of blood donors,” said Audrey Lundey, communications manager for the American Red Cross Southwest-Texas region and spokeswoman for the East Texas region.Throughout the summer, the Texas region of the American Red Cross has been on a blood appeal, informing communities that the blood shortages are so severe that there is less than a day’’s supply of blood available.
“It’’s so important for people to understand that you never know when yourself, your family, friend or neighbor is going to be in need of blood,” Lundey said. The general public presumes that nobody’’s going to bleed to death because there’’s not enough blood,” said Jeffrey McCullough, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the nation’’s blood supply. But finding donors, “is more and more difficult, and the reforms make it more and more expensive,” he said.
An average adult has about 10 pints of blood, and a major trauma victim can need up to 100.Generally, the public’’s concern is blood safety, not supply. That’’s been the case since the 1980s, when HIV-tainted blood infected more than 12,000 patients nationwide through transfusions. Today, a battery of tests screen blood for HIV, hepatitis, West Nile virus and other pathogens.
A series of questions excludes donors who have visited countries with malaria or mad cow disease”The blood supply is extraordinarily safe,” said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania and a former member of a federal advisory committee on blood safety.
“But you have to remember that having blood available is part of safety, too, particularly if you have some kind of disaster and you need a lot.” The blood-bank system began during World War II as a way for citizens to help wounded soldiers on the front lines. Dr. Charles R. Drew discovered how to preserve and store blood, and organized the first blood drive.
Neither subsequent generations nor immigrants have embraced the donor habit as enthusiastically as the war generation. “We don”t have a blood supply problem, we have a blood donor problem,” said Teresa Solorio, spokeswoman for American Red Cross Blood Services of Southern California. “It’’s easier to get people to donate money than to donate blood.”
Even with the development of blood-conserving surgeries, the need for blood has risen because of medical advances and an aging population that needs hip replacements, heart surgery, cancer treatment and kidney transplants.
Blood shortages occur in pockets across the nation, especially in Los Angeles, New York and other large metropolitan areas, which tend to be faster-paced and have less of a sense of community than parts of the Midwest and South, blood experts say. But natural disasters, such as the recent floods in Oklahoma, can mean less blood from states that usually have enough to export. Blood type, like eye color, is inherited.
About 45 percent of whites have type O blood; an estimated 65 percent of Hispanics have it. People with type O blood can receive only type O, and demand is growing as the Latino population grows.
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