The American Red Cross has declared an emergency blood shortage, saying patients are at risk of not getting lifesaving transfusions.
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Donors are needed now more than ever as the Red Cross faces a national emergency shortage, with the number of donors at a 20-year low. Medical director Dr. Eric Gehrie says the Red Cross has experienced a loss of 300,000 donors since the COVID-19 pandemic alone.
“It means that hospitals will order a certain number of units of blood, and those orders are not being filled fully,” he said. “So hospital blood banks are low on blood.”
Gehrie says the Red Cross supplies about 40% of the nation’s blood supply. He says emptier shelves could force hospitals to make excruciating decisions about which patients are prioritized for blood.
“Doctors have to make choices about which patients can receive a transfusion in a given day,” he says. “Surgeries like heart can be delayed waiting for the available blood to be collected and sent to the hospital.”
The issue is donation centers are shitty, workers are untrained, and corporations make a shit ton of money selling our “donations” while people that get it have to pay.
Kind of sours people on donating.
Last time I gave they went thru the vein, gave me a giant “golf ball” hematoma and then the workers “playfully teased me” it was going to slow.
They shut up pretty quickly when I showed them how fucked up my arm was, took almost two weeks for the bruise to go away.
When I stopped donating, I started getting automated phone calls that stared out with a distraught woman screaming:
Help, there’s been an accident!
Fuck these literal vampire corporations. We need a government donation system where 2-3 middlemen don’t make millions and the people who need the blood don’t have to pay for it.
Man I really want to donate blood and I’ve tried several times. The last time I went they literally stuck the needle in, wiggled it around for a few seconds, pulled it out, and then did the same thing two more times.
They wanted to keep trying. Like do they go to a John Wayne Gacy LARP convention to find these people? I’m sorry to anyone who needs others’ blood to survive, but it’s literal torture.
The most fucked up thing, is the “donation centers” are 100% running a cost/benefit analysis.
They’re trying to zero in on getting just enough blood with the bare minimum expense.
They can afford to have better staff and facilities, and they don’t need to rely on crazy phone calls.
But then they don’t make as much off what people are giving away.
Its bad enough we legitimately can’t trust them when they say there’s an emergency. Maybe hospitals are running low, maybe they just want a little more money this quarter.
Have you forgotten where you are? We make everything for profit, from your emergency medical care to your child’s education, call that efficiency, and calling for anything not to be poisoned by the profit motive makes you a filthy commie Leninist socialist who loves Venezuela or something.
Greed and greed worship has destroyed us, the accelerating climate change and diminished growth/metastasis induced collapse will be a mercy in the long term.
I donated blood once a couple of years ago. Afterwards, they called me several times a week for like a year. They still call me like once a month. I can’t get them to stop. They have called me hundreds of times. I’ll never donate again.
I can’t get them to stop
What I did was call back and get a real human.
I explained all the automated calls theyre doing was just making me not want to donate. And that since they come from different numbers I can’t just block them.
So I said the soonest I’ll ever donate to their company was a year after my last phone call.
It’s been like 6-9 months and I haven’t gotten a single phone call.
Because these companies are literal vampires and all they care about is blood.
Not sure if the calls are gonna start again or not.
I don’t know if all orgs changed or just the one I go to (Vitalent) but they don’t ask gendered sex questions anymore. I think was as of 2023. Just “Have you had a new partner in the last three months,” “have you exchanged money or drugs for sex in the last three months” and “Have you had sex with more than one partner in the last three months.”
Both the USA and Canada have made blood donation require more effort.
Pre-pandemic you could simply walk into one of the many convenient blood donation center and walk out inside an hour having done all the test/paperwork and whole blood donation. Not only have they closed many donation locations, but also require you to schedule a donation.
Further, some are getting more picky about what donations they accept. Canadian Blood Services stopped accepting American blood donors in 2020 (temporarily?). They’ve since closed the donation location (but are in the process of building a new one). Finally, they aren’t doing whole blood donations anymore and only taking plasma which requires apheresis blood donation. This mean instead of 25 min or so bleeding, from one arm, its 1.5 to 2 hours of having two tubes hooked up, one to each arm, and them shoving your non-plasma blood back into you.
American Red Cross is requiring scheduled times the last time I checked. I was turned away at the door because of scheduling requirements on two different occasions and don’t think I’ll try for a third.
There was a report in … I dunno, the early 2000’s, that the Australian Red Cross was running extremely low on blood. But when some paper (maybe the Sydney Morning Herald?) investigated, they found that the blood supply itself was fine; what was running low were the igg or igf factors they were removing from the blood and selling to corporations for massive profits. :/
I’m in central Ohio. The regular place I used to go to donate regularly cancels my appointments due to staffing issues. I’ve taken to going to pop-up areas because those don’t cancel appointments. They only do whole blood and power red.
Yes, my understanding is that you have to schedule an appointment, although you can usually schedule for the next day.
Pop-ups doing whole blood, got it. As they get more desperate, I expect we’ll see more of these. And central Ohio has a lot of hospitals.
They just changed the rules recently and made me eligible to donate for the first time in my life. It’s been more complicated than I had anticipated to actually donate! I gather it wasn’t always like this? I just want to walk into a hospital or something and take a half hour nap while they suck me dry.
That’s what happens when ppl are sucked dry by capitalism already!
Yeah, I’ll show myself out
Socialize production but privatize profits.
