Why People Should Donate Blood At Least Once A Year - A Placard I Created For Some Kind of Job

On a road to Freudenstadt (Baden-Wuerttemberg /Germany) a couple had a car accident with a deer last week (military time). Both car occupants lost a lot of blood in this accident and required donor-blood – according to “Tierschutz Euskirchen”.

Seeing how the German red cross had trouble finding a place where they could take blood donations from volunteers in Dettingen an der Erms (Baden-Wuerttemberg /Germany) the protestant church “Christuskirche” now offered the church building for this good cause. On March 21st between half past 2PM and half past 7PM you may go there for a blood donation.

One of the latest episodes of “TopZehn” or “Alltime10” as this TV show is called in the USA was about 10 Unknown Heroes Who Saved The World /> >In the 80’s a young boy from the USA was diagnosed with AIDS. Back then most people didn’t know that much about AIDS. I mean meanwhile any average secondary school (at least in Germany) has biology teachers teach their students about AIDS, but back then things were different. Fearing that this disease could get transmitted easily, they banned this child from school, when he went to church people refused to hake his hand and people didn’t want their newspaper to be delivered by this paper boy. Back then the disease was so unusual that a newspaper wanted to hear his story just as they sometimes interview quite unusual groups other than that like former convicts, refugees or heavily disabled people. Instead of complaining about his awful fate throughout the entire interview however, he told them about scientific literature concerning this disease and he blurted out all kinds of facts concerning AIDS – like how it is transmitted or how AIDS affects the body.
>In the 40’s a Polish man fighting for the Soviet Army wanted the whole world to know what exactly was going on in the German concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He bravely let the German army arrest him, secretly built a radio in the camp and reported to the Russian army everything he saw in the camp as well as the things the German and Austrian staff did to him.
>In 2000 a 4-year old girl suffering from a rare type of cancer that only affects children decided she wanted to help other seriously ill children. So she decided to sell lemonade to raise enough money to do so. These news spread very fast and until her death years later her selling of lemonade earned her about one million dollars which she donated to cancer-research. However the story didn’t end there. Inspired by the deeds of this good girl someone founded an organization to fund the research for a cure. He named it in honor of the child “Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation”. As implied by the “s” in “https” their website “https://www.alexslemonade.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=7” is certified as save to donate money to.
>In the 90’s a boy of only five years from the USA decided to earn some money he wanted to donate to an organisation that provided least developed countries in Africa with clean water. Despite his young age he worked so hard that two years later he had 61.000 dollars donated to this good cause. His doing became so famous that even enterprises and institutions donated to him. In the end he decided to become more organized and to found the “Ryan’s Well Foundation”. He even created the organization’s homepage “https://www.ryanswell.ca/donate/” all by himself. Again the “s” in “https” always stands for “save”.
>Learning that his rare blood-type contained an encyme that could be used to prevent unborn children from getting the rhesus-disease Mr. Harison from the USA decided to regularly donate blood. He even gave doctors some blood they needed for an experiment to find a cure for this rhesus-disease. In the end their experiment was a success – just thanks to this gentleman donating his blood.
>In the 50’s a lady named Mrs. Lacks died of cancer, but examining her dead body doctors found something unusual about her blood cells. They kept growing despite her apparent death. I don’t know much about medicine, so I didn’t understand this, but they then extracted her cells, preserved them – even to this day – and thanks to these cells found a way to cure polio. These cells somehow even helped understanding cancer a bit better.

This month the “WHO” published an updated version of their Blood Safety and Availability Fact Sheet:
>In low-income countries, up to 65% of blood transfusions are given to children under 5 years of age; whereas in high-income countries, the most frequently transfused patient group is over 65 years of age, accounting for up to 76% of all transfusions.
>An increase of 10,7 million blood donations from voluntary unpaid donors has been reported from 2008 to 2013.
>Only 43 of 175 reporting countries produce plasma-derived medicinal products (PDMP) through the fractionation of plasma collected in the country, whereas the majority of the other 132 countries import PDMP from abroad.
>An average number of about 112,5 million blood donations are collected worldwide.
>In high-income-countries the amount of donor-blood that can be used for transfusion is thousands of blood-transfusions higher than in developing countries. LDCs that are located to Africa are the worst off.
>16 countries are not able to screen all donated blood for 1 or more of the infections HIV, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and syphilis.
>125 countries have national guidelines on the appropriate clinical use of blood.
>Transfusion committees are present in 67% of the hospitals performing transfusions in high-income countries and in 34% of the hospitals in middle- and low-income countries.
>In the low-income countries up to 67% of transfusions are for children under the age of 5 years.
>In high-income countries, transfusion is most commonly used for supportive care in cardiovascular surgery, transplant surgery, massive trauma, and therapy for solid and haematological malignancies. In low- and middle-income countries it is used more often to manage pregnancy-related complications and severe childhood anaemia.
>Through its Blood and Transfusion Safety programme, WHO supports countries in developing national blood systems to ensure timely access to safe and sufficient supplies of blood and blood products and good transfusion practices to meet the patients’ needs.

At last I’ve got another comment to post under this picture: Seeing how this scientist was born on a June 14th the German newspaper “Focus” wrote an article about Karl Landsteiner yesterday. It says that he is the discoverer of the blood groups. Before his discovery blood donation was more a thing of good luck. Sometimes it worked and the patient lived and sometimes it did not work and the patient died. His discovery made a successful blood donation much more likely. Partially it was also thanks to him, that later it was discovered that people belonging to the blood group AB accept red blood cells of all other blood groups and thus could theoretically receive blood-donations from anybody. Red blood cells of the blood group 0 on the other hand are fit for any blood group, making people having the blood group 0 perfect blood donors to people of any blood group.