WASHINGTON, July 16 (UPI) -- Blood supplies dropped to their lowest point of the year at the beginning of July and have been falling ever since. Officials from the Red Cross are saying this could lead to compromised patient care.
"The problem with this particular year is that the shortage happened earlier than expected; it began in June and it just kept going from there despite the efforts to raise awareness in the public that donating blood is a necessity," said Stephanie Millian, spokeswoman for the American Red Cross.
The 36 blood-services regions of the American Red Cross have issued appeals in communities in recent weeks, however, saying the need for all blood types remains.
"It is always difficult to collect enough blood to meet the needs of hospital patients, but it is especially challenging during the summer months," Millian said. "With family vacations, school closings and long holiday weekends at both ends of the summer, the blood supply has reached critically low levels nationwide."
Students provide 15 to 20 percent of the Red Cross's blood supply, but when school is out for the summer, donations drop.
At the beginning of July, most of the country had a one- to two-day supply of most blood types -- meaning that the Red Cross had enough blood to treat all the patients in America's hospitals for one to two days depending on the region.
The supply needs to be between a five- and seven-day level, Millian said.
"We are falling short by several hundred pints a day," said Karen Kelley, manager of communications and marketing for the northern Ohio region of the Red Cross. "We serve 57 hospitals and need to collect enough blood to support 12,000 transfusions every week. To do that we need to collect 900 pints of blood a day. And unfortunately for us there are days when we are only collecting 700, 600 or even 500."
They have no A-negative and B-negative blood in stock. Typically, the minimum amount of O negative they are supposed to have is 225 units -- they currently have five.
"We're really, really struggling here," Kelley said. "The interesting thing is that if our communities thought that there was less than a half a day's supply of water or that there were only five gallons of water available when there should have been 200, everyone would be upset. Yet you can live without water for much longer than you can live without blood," Kelley said.
Coupling the shortage, the demand for blood products is higher than ever.
Blood is needed in hospitals and emergency-treatment facilities to help everyone from cancer patients and transplant recipients to accident victims.
Before surgery, a patient's blood is tested. The order of surgery is often determined by the compatibility a patient's blood has with the blood on the hospital's shelf, said Dr. Bradford Sherburne, blood bank director at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut.
"I came very close to canceling someone's surgery yesterday. I had a gentleman who had an elective heart surgery ... and he was O negative, and I only had five units of O negative on my shelf. I need to have four units of O negative on my shelf in case a child or a woman of child-bearing age has an emergency and needs to get an emergency transfusion. So I wouldn't have been able to cover both of those people."
"I was going to go up and talk to him and say, 'Alright, there is no O negative in the house, here are your options. You can either go home right now and wait until we have enough O-negative blood, which might be until September. Don't do anything too strenuous. Or you can take the chance that you might need blood ... and if we do have to give you blood then we will give you O positive," Sherburne said.
And giving O-positive blood to O-negative male patients is the standard practice.
"It's done in transfusion centers throughout the country," Sherburne said.
If someone is O negative and he or she get a unit of O positive, the Rh factor is significant if you are going to have babies, Sherburne said. "But if you show up with a gunshot wound and we know you're male regardless of age, you get O positive."
The result of giving an O-negative male patient O-positive blood is that in about 60 days or so, the patient will make a red-cell antibody, which will make it harder to cross match the patient if they needed a blood transfusion -- they would have to receive O-negative blood.
"As far as surgery is concerned, if you have elective surgery planned and it's not expected to use blood, then fine, we can do it," Sherburne said. "But if it requires a lot of blood and is not life-threatening, then it might be postponed."
"The thing that scares me the most is not having the blood to perform a transplant surgery if an organ becomes available," Sherburne said.
"We had a chance to do two group-O liver transplants this past weekend, and it was only because the Red Cross started emergency rationing earlier this year and were really hoarding for a rainy day that the Red Cross had enough O's become available," Sherburne said.
Even in a major research hospital such as John Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, they are feeling the crunch -- but not as much.
"We are seeming to get by alright. We are told that platelets are in short supply, and oftentimes what happens when the Red Cross is having problems is that they have problems in the central inventory but they continue to give us as much as we need," said Dr. Paul Ness, professor of pathology and director of transfusion medicine at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
This is because the hospital has a large oncology program and large transplant programs, Ness said.
"Statistically, we have greater needs than many hospitals in our area. ... We know that we use a greater portion of the supply here than other hospitals in Baltimore or Washington ... but I think it's based on medical necessity," Ness said.
Many people don't realize there is a shortage of blood -- they get complacent and don't donate, Sherburne said.
And although about 60 percent of Americans are eligible to donate blood, only 5 percent do.
Of that 5 percent, one in seven who show up to donate are told "thanks, but no thanks," said Sherburne. He argues that the restrictions placed on who is eligible to donate blood are too strict and are very arbitrary in certain cases. People who have spent more than three months in the United Kingdom since 1980 are not eligible to donate blood for the rest of their lives out of fear of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (Mad Cow Disease), according the Red Cross.
Before that regulation was in place it was only one in 20 that were turned away.
That means people who go to Europe on their summer vacations are now never allowed to donate blood, said Sherburne.
Also, they will take people who have been eating English beef for two months, but not three. It seems pretty arbitrary, Sherburne said.
Another way to increase the number of donors is to lower the accepted blood count for women to donate blood, Sherburne said.
"While it tends to accommodate most men, I think we know that women tend to run a little bit lower, and we're extremely conservative. ... If we could just lower it a little bit for women, it probably would do no harm," Sherburne said.
And with the Republican National Convention coming to New York, "We're all sitting on pins and needles hoping that there isn't some national tragedy that will require big blood use because there is no strategic blood reserve, Sherburne said. Blood is only good for 42 days once you donate," Sherburne said.
"In the event of a tragedy, people will die because there is no way that we would be able to transfuse large numbers of people for all required major surgery at once," Sherburne said.
"A lot of people have said, 'Well, why don't you just freeze it?' Well freezing blood is impractical. It takes three hours to get blood from the frozen state to the useable state. There are not that many machines that are available in the hospitals or the blood centers. It's not going to protect us in the event of an emergency or a huge blood demand," Sherburne said.
The Red Cross provides half of America's blood supply -- collecting more than 6 million units a year from volunteer donors.
All blood types are needed, and especially type O-negative blood -- the universal blood donor type. Anyone at least 17 years of age, weighing 110 pounds or more and feeling in good health may be eligible to donate blood. To make an appointment call the American Red Cross at 1-800-GIVE-LIFE (1-800-448-3543) or log on to givelife.org and make an appointment today.
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