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New restrictions may dry up blood supply
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As the federal government unveils regulations aimed at safeguarding the nation’s blood supply from mad cow disease, it becomes painfully obvious that the need for new donors never has been greater.
Few Americans ever take a minute to consider that, in the cases of most hospitalizations or other emergencies, the blood needed to keep them alive must come from another human being.
Yet, 95 percent of us depend on the civic consciousness of a very few. The latest data show that just 5 percent of Americans healthy enough to donate blood do so. And that percentage is even lower in our biggest cities.
For years, this has added up to serious blood shortages at most city hospitals two or three times a year, generally during the year-end holidays and at mid-summer.
But now, days after the Food and Drug Administration unveiled donation restrictions prompted by the epidemic of mad cow (technically known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob) disease, or CJD in Europe, those shortages eventually could turn into one yearlong crisis.
The new rules, to be phased in between next spring and fall, come on top of federal regulations issued in the last decade that help to keep the AIDS virus and the various hepatitis strains out of the blood supply.
In addition, the curbs – some permanent and some for specified periods – involve anyone:
-Who has lived in certain parts of Africa since 1977.
-Who has had a tattoo within 13 months.
-Who had malaria in the past three years.
-Who traveled to malaria-endemic countries such as those in Central and South America in the past year.
With risk factors for HIV infection, which include injecting illegal drugs even once, homosexual intercourse even once since 1977 or being given money or drugs for sex.
These already have reduced the nation’s normal donor pool.
And yet the need for blood has risen in our hospitals, trauma centers, clinics and convalescent centers.
In New York, blood center officials have won assurances from the American Red Cross, which collects half of the nation’s blood, and America’s Blood Banks, which cull the other half, to provide emergency shipments from elsewhere in the U.S., in case of severe shortages.
In the Chicago area, LifeSource Blood Services, the Glenview-based organization that conducts drives across northern Illinois and serves 160 hospitals and home care agencies, has begun new efforts, and is planning more, to increase donor turnouts.
Getting numbers up
LifeSource spokeswoman Cheryl Balough said the efforts are paying off. This year’s donations to LifeSource are up 7 percent from 2000, she said.
In addition, LifeSource has set up a joint venture with the Defense Department and Great Lakes Naval Base, as well as other corporate drive sponsors, to encourage donations, particularly around the year-end holidays.
Starting this month, the American Red Cross, which collects blood in most sections of America but not in Chicago, is planning to refuse donations from people who spent a cumulative three months in Britain or six months in any part of Europe since 1980.
That means thousands more donors will be turned away.
LifeSource, however, does not plan to enforce such new independent rules, choosing instead to follow the regulations outlined last week by the federal government.
Under the new FDA plan, blood banks by May 31 will have to bar donors who have:
-Spent three or more cumulative months in Britain from 1980 through 1996.
-Spent five or more cumulative years in France from 1980 to the present.
-Spent six months or more, as American military personnel or dependents, on bases in northern Europe from 1980 through 1990, and elsewhere in Europe from 1980 through 1996. That’s when British beef was sold on those U.S. bases; it was through the beef that mad cow was spread.
Received a blood transfusion in Britain since 1980.
The FDA is estimating the new rules will eliminate 5 percent of current blood donors.
The restrictions will be tightened further next fall, when the FDA begins barring donors who spent a cumulative five years or more anywhere in Europe since 1980.
Balough emphasized that there is no evidence that “variant CJD” ever has been transmitted through blood transfusions, even among Europeans who donated blood. So far, it has spread only through tainted beef.
Sixty or 70 years ago, the problems involving the roundup of donors were few.
Americans in wartime, and as recently as the 1950s, would jump at an emergency appeal for blood.
But society has changed.
We’re living closer to each other now, and yet we are farther apart. We see our ailing neighbors nearby, and yet we don’t see their needs. Neighbors no longer look out for each other.
As a result, patients in our hospitals frequently must put off elective surgery because of the lack of blood on hand.
More people are working longer hours and filling their days with more activities, even though donating blood is not nuclear physics and requires no more than 40 or 50 minutes. And that includes the paperwork required by the feds.
Since the early 1980s, when news of AIDS exploded across the country, fewer and fewer Americans have turned out for blood drives.
Many people hear the word “needle” and react negatively without realizing that a new needle is used for each donor or that HIV never has been contracted by donating blood.
Benefits of donation
In fact, the act of donating has been proved in research labs to reduce the risks of heart attacks and cancer. This is because it curtails the buildup of iron in the system, which is especially beneficial for middle-age men and for women who have reached menopause.
As longtime donors who were born in the 1920s and `30s get older, ailments and medications disqualify them from the donor pool, and the search goes on for younger Americans.
In many cases, it takes an injury or death in the family to show young people the need for blood donations.
A few years ago, a teenager, obviously under the required age of 17 for donating, turned up at one of the four quarterly drives conducted by the Westchester Blood Program in the western suburb.
She was asked why she was there.
“I asked my dad to get special permission from LifeSource, and they said OK,” the teenager answered.
“My mother was in the hospital and, before she died of breast cancer, I saw how important it was to donate blood.”
Carl J. Panek is an editor on the Tribune’s foreign/national desk. For 15 years, he also has been chairman of the Westchester Blood Program, honored last year by the American Association of Blood Banks for its efforts, which include the collection of 17,701 donations through quarterly drives since its founding in 1974.
c 2001, Chicago Tribune.
Carl J. Panek, Chicago Tribune (KRT)