50 Fun Facts About Blood Donation

Charles Drew, who led the 1940 Blood for Britain plasma drive, quit the American Red Cross over which practice?

Segregating donations by race had no scientific basis, Drew argued, yet the Red Cross kept the policy until 1950. He had been appointed director of its first blood bank in February 1941.

Donated platelets sit at room temperature under constant agitation, which limits their shelf life to about how long?

Five days is typical because warm storage lets any bacteria that slipped in multiply, so platelets sit at 20–24 °C and are tested for contamination before use.

Why does blood donation use a large 16- or 17-gauge needle rather than a finer one?

A wide bore is used to avoid shearing red cells, which the forces inside a narrow needle can physically damage as the blood flows through.

According to the American Red Cross, someone in the United States needs blood roughly how often?

Every two seconds for blood and every thirty seconds for platelets, says the Red Cross, and demand for a given type is never steady, so a bank can be full of one group and short of another.

From 1988 to 2013, what did US blood banks see during every national disaster, such as the September 11 attacks?

A surplus of donations of more than 100 units followed each disaster, because people give most in a crisis, when the blood is arguably least needed. First-week donations after 9/11 reached about 49,000.

In which country do blood donors get the day of their donation as a paid holiday from work?

Italy grants donors a paid day off, one of many non-cash incentives alongside the T-shirts, first-aid kits and priority-in-shortage promises that blood centres hand out elsewhere.

Members of which religion may refuse transfusions, giving bloodless surgery and blood substitutes special importance?

Jehovah's Witnesses hold that blood is sacred, and an oxygen-carrying substitute would also sidestep disease transmission and the chronic donor shortage.

Why are directed donations from family and friends not safer for the recipient, despite a common belief?

Donors may hide risk factors when pressured to give for a loved one, so directed units can carry a higher, not lower, risk of bloodborne infection.

In 1997 the World Health Organization set a goal that every blood donation should come from which kind of donor?

Unpaid volunteers were the standard in only 49 of 124 countries surveyed by 2006, and most plasma donors in the United States are still paid for each visit.

Unlike red cells or platelets, frozen plasma is typically given an expiry date of how long after donation?

One year is the usual expiry for frozen plasma, which is why keeping up a plasma supply is far less of a problem than maintaining stocks of the cellular components.

Which anticoagulant did Albert Hustin and Luis Agote separately use in 1914 for the first indirect blood transfusions?

Sodium citrate strips calcium ions out of blood so it cannot clot, and Richard Lewisohn fixed its safe concentration at 0.2% the following year, letting donor and patient be far apart.

During which conflict did Frederic Durán-Jordà's Barcelona transfusion service register almost 30,000 donors?

The Spanish Civil War service processed 9,000 litres of blood in 30 months, and Durán-Jordà fled to Britain in 1938 to help build London's network of blood banks.

What is the minimum weight the American Red Cross sets for a whole-blood or platelet donor?

110 pounds (50 kg) is the floor, rising to 130 pounds for men and 150 pounds for women who give 'power red' double units of red cells by apheresis.

Along with hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV, which infection rounds out the WHO's four core tests for donated blood?

Syphilis serology is the fourth basic test, yet in 2006 the WHO reported that 56 of 124 countries surveyed did not run the four on every donation.

Donated plasma is normally yellow; which pigment, also behind jaundice, is a main reason for the colour?

Bilirubin, carotenoids, haemoglobin and transferrin tint plasma yellow, while a green shade can point to ceruloplasmin and a brown one to broken red cells.

In May 2023 the US FDA replaced its deferral for men who have sex with men with donor questions focused on what?

Individual sexual behaviour, not orientation or gender, now drives the US screen, which began as a lifetime ban the FDA imposed in 1983.

Canadian Blood Services, set up in 1998, runs the blood supply in every province and territory except which one?

Quebec runs its own operator, Héma-Québec, which supplies the province's patients and also manages its stem cell donor registry.

Which supplement cuts the number of donors turned away for low red-cell counts, but often upsets the stomach?

Iron-supplemented donors keep higher haemoglobin and iron stores, but the pills frequently cause diarrhoea, constipation and abdominal discomfort.

World Blood Donor Day, organised by the WHO with Red Cross and transfusion bodies, was first held in which year?

2004 saw the first event, staged by the WHO, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, the IFBDO and the ISBT to thank donors and promote safe blood.

Which British Red Cross worker ran the world's first blood donor service from his London home, starting in 1921?

Percy Lane Oliver's panel grew from 20 colleagues to about 2,700 donors by 1938, and London Rover Scouts were enlisted as demand rose; English Heritage put a plaque on the house in 1979.

Which American doctor set up the first blood banks on the Western Front in 1917, using soldiers as donors?

Oswald Hope Robertson had learned blood matching and preservation under Peyton Rous, and stocked bottles of blood at Casualty Clearing Stations ahead of the Third Battle of Ypres.

In 1916 Peyton Rous and Joseph Turner found that adding which sugar to treated blood kept red cells usable for weeks?

Glucose, as a dextrose solution, kept the cells intact for about four weeks in the Rous–Turner mixture, the discovery that paved the way for blood preservation and the blood bank.

Carl Walter and W. P. Murphy Jr. replaced the breakable glass bottle for blood collection in 1950 with what?

A plastic bag made it safe and easy to split a single unit of whole blood into several components, which reshaped what one donation could supply.

The 1940 Blood for Britain project collected plasma for shipment across the Atlantic from hospitals where?

New York City hospitals took donations from almost 15,000 people over five months, yielding more than 5,500 vials of plasma for British soldiers and civilians.

Richard Titmuss's 1970 book comparing Britain's voluntary and America's commercial blood systems had what title?

The Gift Relationship came down in favour of the British model, and the sociologist's book is still cited in debates about turning blood into a commodity.

Which country collects whole-blood donations in units of just 200 or 400 millilitres, among the smallest anywhere?

Japan's 200 mL option sits far below the 460–500 mL drawn in the United States, while India takes 350 mL and Singapore 350 or 450 mL.

Plasma donors in the United States may give twice a week, so could nominally donate roughly how much in a year?

About 83 litres, or 22 gallons, is possible under US rules, whereas a donor limited to every other week, as in some countries, could give only about 16 litres.

To count as fresh frozen plasma in the United States, plasma must be frozen solid within how long of collection?

Eight hours is the US cut-off, at −18 °C or colder; plasma frozen within 24 hours is a separate product, PF24, with similar uses.

Which blood product, rich in fibrinogen and factor VIII, did Judith Graham Pool devise at Stanford in 1964?

Cryoprecipitate is made by slowly thawing frozen plasma to 1-6 C, and US regulators did not approve it until 1971, seven years after Pool's method.

Which colleague of Karl Landsteiner co-discovered the Rh factor and went on to devise the rival Rh–Hr naming system?

Alexander Wiener's Rh–Hr nomenclature competes with the Fisher–Race CDE system, and his once-doubted idea that one gene could carry several specificities later proved correct.

Australian James Harrison, the 'Man with the Golden Arm', donated 1,173 times; what made his blood so sought after?

Rare anti-D antibodies in his plasma went into every batch of anti-D made in New South Wales, protecting babies from haemolytic disease of the newborn, and he gave from 1954 until 2018.

Which Bolshevik polymath founded Moscow's transfusion institute seeking rejuvenation, and died from one in 1928?

Alexander Bogdanov had undergone 11 transfusions and reported sharper eyesight before taking blood from a student who had malaria and tuberculosis, at a time when such risks were poorly understood.

Which Oxford physician performed the first recorded blood transfusion between two dogs, in February 1665?

Richard Lower then worked with Edmund King to transfuse sheep's blood into the scholar Arthur Coga before the Royal Society on 23 November 1667, one of the first such attempts on a person.

After a whole-blood donation, how long does it take healthy adult men on average to replace the lost red cells?

About 36 days is the bone marrow's average catch-up time for red cells, while the donated plasma is replaced within two to three days, which is why whole-blood waits run to weeks.

In the United States, how long must a donor wait between platelet apheresis donations, far less than for whole blood?

Seven days is the platelet gap because apheresis returns the donor's red cells, so platelets and plasma can be given far more often than whole blood.

Australia's Red Cross Blood Service became 'Lifeblood' in 2019 partly because it now also collects what?

Breast milk, microbiota, tissue and organs had joined blood on its books, so the name and branding changed on 15 November 2019.

Why were people who had spent six months in the UK between 1980 and 1996 long barred from giving blood in Australia?

Risk of variant CJD, the human form of 'mad cow disease', kept the rule in place until Australia's Therapeutic Goods Administration agreed to drop it in April 2022, effective that July.

Pathologist Leo McCarthy says US blood shortages recur between Christmas and New Year and which two summer dates?

July 4 and Labor Day bracket the summer lull, and because most components keep only days or weeks, banks cannot simply stockpile ahead of the dip.

England and Wales formed the world's first national blood transfusion service in which year?

1946 came after the wartime London depots, and the service became a nationally coordinated body only in 1996 before folding into NHS Blood and Transplant in 2005.

Which 1989 emulsion was, as of 2025, still the only oxygen-carrying blood substitute the FDA had ever fully approved?

Fluosol-DA was made by the Green Cross Corporation, but the need to store it frozen and rewarm it killed demand and production ended in 1994.

To cut the risk of transfusion-related lung injury, Germany in 2009 excluded plasma donors with a history of what?

Pregnancy exposes a woman to fetal blood and can leave immune proteins that trigger TRALI, the leading cause of US transfusion deaths from 2008 to 2012, so such plasma is diverted into other products.

Red cells can be frozen for years for rare types, but only after mixing them with which protective compound?

Glycerol at 40% by weight lets red cells survive in −60 to −80 °C freezers, but the process is expensive and needs an extremely cold freezer, so it stays rare.

Karl Landsteiner left Vienna in 1923, aged 55, for which New York research body, at Simon Flexner's invitation?

The Rockefeller Institute was where Peyton Rous had worked out how to preserve stored blood, and Landsteiner stayed there for the rest of his career.

Blood drawn from people treated for which iron-overload condition is safe to donate, though some US banks refuse it?

Haemochromatosis patients have blood drawn regularly as treatment, and Australian Red Cross Lifeblood accepts those units while some US banks turn away any donor with a blood disease.

During the Korean War, which plasma protein replaced dried plasma for combat use?

Serum albumin is the most common plasma protein and holds up the blood's osmotic pressure; without it, blood would be nearly as thin as water.

In 1988 umbilical cord blood stem cells were first used clinically, to treat a young boy with which condition?

Fanconi anaemia was the first target, and nearly all cord blood transplants since have come from public banks, because most treatable conditions cannot use a child's own stored cord blood.

Why do blood services discourage donating as a way of getting a free, anonymous infection test?

False negatives can slip through because standard tests miss very recent infections, and a missed one means a contaminated unit, which is why some banks add p24 antigen or nucleic acid tests.

Which government gives blood donors four months of free outpatient and hospital treatment after every donation?

Malaysia's benefit is one of the larger non-cash rewards on offer, in a world where most centres manage little more than time off, T-shirts and first-aid kits.

Laboratory testing of a donated unit in the United States takes at least how long before it can be released?

48 hours is the minimum, which is one reason a bag given during a crisis rarely reaches the victims of that crisis and why standing stocks matter more than surges.

Which East African country raised the share of its voluntary donors from 20 percent in 2005 to 80 percent in 2007?

Tanzania's jump stood out in a WHO survey in which 68 of 124 countries had made little or no progress toward an all-volunteer supply.