50 Fun Facts About Blood Donation

Charles Drew, who led the 1940 Blood for Britain plasma drive, condemned which wartime Red Cross practice as unscientific?

Segregating donations by race replaced an outright ban on Black donors, under which Drew himself could not have given blood to the programme he had helped to build.

Donated platelets last only about five days because, unlike red cells, they are stored how?

At room temperature, rocked constantly so they don't clump, platelets are more open to bacterial growth than chilled blood, which is why they have to be used within about five days.

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

To avoid shearing red cells: forced through a narrow needle, the cells can rupture. The wide bore also lets a pint flow out in about ten minutes.

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

Every two seconds, the Red Cross says, and because blood cannot be manufactured, each of those units has to come out of another person's arm.

What did US blood banks see in the weeks after the September 11 attacks, as after other national disasters?

A surplus of donations followed 9/11: far more blood was given than the survivors could use, so an unusually large share of it expired on the shelf and had to be thrown away.

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

Italy's 2005 blood law lets employees take the whole day of a donation off on normal pay, and a donor turned away as unfit is still paid for the time the check took.

Which religion's ban on blood transfusions has made bloodless surgery and blood substitutes especially important for its members?

Jehovah's Witnesses take the Bible's command to 'abstain from blood' to rule out transfusions, and describe the stand as a religious rather than a medical one.

Directed donations from relatives are widely believed safer, so why can they be less safe?

Donors may hide risk factors when a loved one is counting on them, and studies have found more positive infection markers in directed units than in blood from repeat community donors.

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

Unpaid volunteers are the target because bloodborne infections are rarest among them, yet when the WHO surveyed 124 countries in 2006 only 49 relied on them entirely.

O negative is the universal donor for red cells, but which blood group is the universal donor for plasma?

Group AB plasma has neither anti-A nor anti-B antibodies, so it can go to a patient of any type, and with only about 4% of Americans in the group it is usually in short supply.

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

Sodium citrate binds the calcium that blood needs to clot, so a donor's blood could for the first time be bottled and carried to the patient instead of flowing arm to arm.

In which 1930s conflict did Frederic Durán-Jordà's transfusion service send bottled blood to the front in refrigerated vehicles?

The Spanish Civil War service drew its blood from volunteers answering radio appeals in Barcelona, then bottled it and drove it chilled some 200 km to the Aragon front.

Why does the American Red Cross require blood donors to weigh at least 110 pounds?

Less blood volume: a pint is a bigger share of a light donor's supply, and to give a double unit of red cells takes at least 130 pounds for men and 150 for women.

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 helps give plasma its straw colour, and extra turns it deep yellow. A green unit can come instead from a donor on the contraceptive pill, whose blood carries more of a copper-binding protein.

Since a May 2023 FDA change, which trait no longer decides whether a man may give blood in the US?

His sexual orientation no longer matters: since the FDA's May 2023 guidance every US donor answers the same questions about recent sexual activity, whoever their partners are.

Which Canadian province runs its own blood operator instead of joining Canadian Blood Services, set up in 1998?

Quebec set up Héma-Québec in 1998, the year the Krever inquiry into Canada's tainted-blood scandal led the country to take its blood supply out of the Red Cross's hands.

Which supplement cuts the number of donors turned away for low haemoglobin, though it often upsets the stomach?

Iron leaves the body with every donation, so regular donors who don't replace it can run short; trials found that supplements cut deferrals, at the price of more constipation and nausea.

World Blood Donor Day, 14 June, marks the birthday of the scientist who discovered what?

ABO blood groups were described in 1901 by Karl Landsteiner, born 14 June 1868, who saw that mismatched human blood could explain the shock that followed some early transfusions; it won him the 1930 Nobel Prize.

The world's first blood donor service began in 1921 in which city, run from Red Cross worker Percy Oliver's home?

London's service began after Oliver answered a hospital's urgent call for blood in 1921, and the panel of tested donors he then ran from his own house became the model copied across Britain and abroad.

The first blood banks are older than many assume: US Army doctor Oswald Robertson set them up during which conflict?

The First World War depots, stocked in 1917 with bottles of stored blood ready for the wounded, earned Robertson the credit as developer of the first blood bank, and a British DSO.

In 1916 Peyton Rous and Joseph Turner found that adding which sugar to treated blood let it be stored for later use?

Glucose joined the anticoagulant in what became known as the Rous–Turner solution, so blood no longer had to pass straight from donor to patient: it could wait in a bottle until it was needed.

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 gave 14,556 donations by January 1941; Charles Drew was called back to run the project once it became clear that each hospital needed to collect and test its plasma the same way.

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

The Gift Relationship argued that giving blood freely builds social solidarity while a market in blood erodes it, a case since carried into arguments over the sale of kidneys.

Which country takes whole-blood donations in units of 200 or 400 millilitres, where Americans give about a pint?

Japan now steers donors away from its own smaller size: hospitals have less and less use for 200 mL units, so anyone who meets the age and weight rules is asked to give 400 mL instead.

Why can US plasma donors give twice a week when whole-blood donors must wait eight weeks?

Their red cells are returned by the machine, so donors lose only plasma, and US rules allow two donations a week, which adds up to a nominal 83 litres a year.

Donated plasma is frozen within hours of collection mainly to protect what?

Its clotting factors are what patients need it for, so plasma is frozen fast and then keeps for a year; under US rules only plasma in the freezer within eight hours counts as 'fresh frozen'.

Judith Graham Pool's 1960s discovery of cryoprecipitate, a concentrate made from frozen plasma, transformed the treatment of which inherited disease?

Haemophilia became far easier to treat: Pool found that the protein patients lack settles out when frozen plasma is thawed slowly in the cold, which gave doctors a concentrated dose for the first time.

The Rh factor in blood typing, the 'positive' or 'negative' after your group, is named after which animal?

Rhesus monkey red cells, injected into rabbits, produced a serum that also clumped most people's blood, and those people were labelled Rh-positive; the human factor later proved not quite the same as the monkey's.

James Harrison, Australia's 'Man with the Golden Arm', helped save 2.4 million babies because his blood contained what?

Rare anti-D antibodies from his plasma went into injections that stop a mother's immune system attacking her unborn baby's blood; he donated 1,173 times, from the age of 18 until he was 81.

Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov, who died after exchanging blood with a student, founded a blood transfusion institute in which city?

Moscow's institute was his attempt to prove that shared blood could renew the body, and it cost him his life in 1928, while the student, by the usual account, made a full recovery.

Hoping to calm a troubled scholar, Richard Lower transfused him before the Royal Society in 1667 with blood from which animal?

Sheep's blood did Arthur Coga no harm, two years after Lower had made the first recorded successful transfusion, from one dog to another.

After a blood donation, which part of the body makes the replacement red cells over the following weeks?

The bone marrow needs about five weeks on average to rebuild the lost red cells, though the fluid is topped up within days, which is why whole-blood donors are asked to wait eight weeks.

Platelets can be given every seven days, and many of them go to patients being treated for which disease?

Cancer treatment drives platelet counts dangerously low, so patients need regular top-ups to prevent bleeding, and because platelets keep for only days the supply has to be renewed constantly.

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

Breast milk had joined blood in 2018: Lifeblood pasteurises donated milk and sends it to neonatal units for premature babies, and the old name no longer covered the job.

Australia long barred blood donors who had spent six months in the UK between 1980 and 1996, for fear of which disease?

Variant CJD, the human form of 'mad cow disease', cannot be screened for in donated blood, so the only safeguard was to turn donors away; Australia lifted the rule in July 2022.

The term 'blood bank' was coined in 1937 by Bernard Fantus at Cook County Hospital, in which US city?

Chicago's bank earned the name: Fantus borrowed the methods of banking, so that refrigerated blood was held as deposits and could be drawn out on credit.

Britain's national blood service grew from emergency depots of which war?

The Second World War depots were kept on when peace came: former Army transfusion staff turned the emergency system into a national service in 1946, and it was later absorbed into the NHS.

Fluosol, approved by the US FDA in 1989 and withdrawn in 1994, was an attempt to make what?

Artificial blood of a kind: Fluosol was an emulsion of man-made chemicals that could carry oxygen, the first such substitute the FDA ever approved, but side effects and awkward handling ended its run.

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

Pregnancy can leave a woman with antibodies that, passed on in her plasma, may inflame a patient's lungs; German reports of the reaction fell markedly once such donors were screened out.

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

Glycerol protects the cells from ice crystals as they freeze, a use Audrey Smith reported in 1950, and it must all be washed out again before the thawed blood can be transfused.

Karl Landsteiner moved to New York in 1923 to join which research body, where he worked until his death?

The Rockefeller Institute was where he went on to help find the Rh factor, and where, still at the bench at 75, he suffered a fatal heart attack in his laboratory, pipette in hand.

People with which inherited condition are treated by having blood drawn, blood that is safe for others to receive?

Haemochromatosis is treated by regular bloodletting, and the blood is perfectly usable: the American Red Cross and Australia's Lifeblood both accept donors who have the condition.

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

Serum albumin took over because dried plasma was passing hepatitis to the wounded; albumin could do the same job of holding fluid inside the blood vessels.

The first cord blood transplant, in 1988, treated a boy with Fanconi anaemia using blood saved at whose birth?

His baby sister's cord blood was a perfect tissue match and free of the faulty gene, as tests before her birth had shown, so it was collected and frozen the day she was born.

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

False negatives can slip through because tests can miss an infection caught only days before, and a single missed one puts a contaminated unit on the shelf.

Malaysia rewards a first blood donation with four months of which benefit?

Free hospital treatment is the reward, covering outpatient care and a second-class ward for four months, and the cover grows longer the more often a donor has given.

Which machine splits a unit of donated whole blood into red cells, plasma and platelets?

Centrifuges spin each unit until the red cells settle at the bottom and the plasma rises to the top, so one donation becomes several products, each stored in its own way.

Which staple of modern blood drives did Charles Drew introduce during a 1941 Red Cross pilot programme?

The bloodmobile began as Drew's mobile collection unit, a refrigerated station on wheels that took the clinic to the donors instead of waiting for them to come to a hospital.