Facing one of the Triangle's longest and largest blood shortages in history, area health professionals are looking to the Red Cross to boost the amount of blood units in storage.
The local shortage is part of a nationwide problem that the Red Cross hopes to correct by introducing two pilot programs designed to attract more donors.
Most area hospitals have just a one- or two-day supply of blood, short of the three-day ideal. Hospitals in many other regions of the country have also experienced problems. At one point six weeks ago, there was a 24-hour span where there were only three units of O-positive blood left at one of the Red Cross' two major shipping areas for the Triangle.
And although the national Red Cross prefers to keep 80,000 units available, it only has about 36,000 right now. "[It has] a lot to do with usage of blood," said Debbie Estes, director of public relations for the Red Cross' regional chapter, which covers 110 hospitals in the Carolinas and Tennessee. "The demand for blood is up tremendously."
Estes said that in this region, there were 14,000 more units of blood requested last year than in the previous year, partly due to a growth in population and also because of an increase in the types of surgeries requiring large amounts of blood.
A liver transplant, for example, could require as many as 100 units of blood. Each donor gives one unit.
Estes said the
The supply will eventually rebound, Estes said, but it may take over a month for some regions to recover completely.
Some health professionals have suggested that increased restrictions on blood donation may contribute significantly to the situation. Due to concerns about the so-called "mad cow" disease, for example, the Federal Drug Administration recently ruled that people who spent more than six months in the United Kingdom between 1980 and 1986 may not donate blood. In addition, those who have traveled in the last three years to a country where malaria is a problem-even if they did not travel to a malarial-risk area of the country-may not donate. Because of a more conservative method of measuring red blood cell count, some people who previously would have been eligible to donate may no longer be able to do so.
"Together, these changes add up to very significant losses of prospective donors," said Steve Bredehoeft, director of transfusion services at Duke. He said that although the change in red blood measurement is widely accepted as a necessary move, the other restrictions are more contentious.
But Estes said fewer than 2 percent of donors were turned away because they did not meet the U.K. restriction. "Would we still have had the shortage if those issues had not been in place? Yes, I think we would," she said. "No matter how much [the collections] grow..., the usage grows even more."
Typically, the nation faces blood shortages during the summer, but the situation is usually relieved in the fall; this year has been unusually slow.
The most severe blood shortages have occurred in all types of O, A and B blood. Several hospitals face particularly acute shortages of type O-the type most commonly used for emergency cases when a patient's blood type is not readily available. "For some reason, it seems like a lot of blood donors are type A but when they come to the hospital, they're type O," joked Laura McClannan, administrative director of transfusion medicine and transplant laboratory services at University of North Carolina Hospitals.
Although hospitals in Atlanta and Los Angeles have had to cancel some elective surgeries because of the blood shortage, no regional hospitals have been forced to cancel or delay any operations.
"At this point, the Red Cross has been able to provide sufficient blood products for us to meet the needs of our patients, but we are never far from being in a place of very serious shortage," Bredehoeft said.
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