Los Angeles – In the blood business, Labor Day is the last hurdle of the donor-dry summer. Soon, college and corporate blood drives will get underway to replenish reserves.
A dwindling pool of donors nationwide, however, could turn today’s seasonal shortages into a year-round drought, blood experts say. On average, just 5 percent of U.S. adults donate blood.
“The general public presumes that nobody’s going to bleed to death because there’s not enough blood,” said Dr. Jeffrey McCullough, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of Minnesota and an expert on the nation’s blood supply.
But locating donors, he said, “is more and more difficult, and the reforms make it more and more expensive.”
A typical 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.
Temporary restrictions on everything from travel to tattoos often end up deterring donors permanently. A study by McCullough in the July issue of the journal Transfusion concluded that 37 percent of the U.S. population is now eligible to give blood, down from an estimated 60 percent in the 1990s.
“The blood supply is extraordinarily safe,” said Arthur Cap lan, 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.”
Officials at Bonfils Blood Center, which collects 80 percent of the blood donated in Colorado, said Wednesday that there is a 20 percent decline in blood donations during the summer.
But Julie Scott, spokeswoman for the center, said blood shortages are not currently a problem in Denver or along the Front Range. Rarely does blood have to be imported into the region, said Scott, as happens in Southern California, for example.
“We are lucky to have a community which steps up and gives blood,” she said.
“Right now, we have a five-day supply of blood. We like to have a seven- to 10-day supply in case of a catastrophic event, such as Hurricane Katrina. Since we collect more than we need, we are sometimes asked to send blood to such disasters,” she added.
Roughly 4 percent of the eligible population gives blood here, Scott said. The center supplies blood to more than 200 health care facilities along the Front Range and in some mountain communities. It needs to collect 4,350 blood donations weekly to meet needs of the community and for any unexpected events.
