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Sep 14, 2009
Some people joke that they "give blood" for their company, a metaphor for how hard they work. But nowadays, with high unemployment rates there are fewer workers available to literally give their blood to the American Red Cross and other organizations at on-the-job drives.
Corporate blood drives help to bolster local blood supplies across the country, but as the U.S. unemployment rate hit 9.7 percent last month, blood banks are starting to feel the pinch, reports the Associated Press.
"We are seeing a direct effect of the recession," Toni Gould, a spokesperson for Michigan Community Blood Centers, told the AP. "So many businesses and factories are closing, and they accounted for a large share of mobile drives." The group has seen a 15 to 20 percent decrease in donations for the summer as the state's unemployment rate has crept up to 15.6 percent.
Nov 7, 2008 | 2
Federal drug regulators have seized batches of the tainted blood thinner heparin from a Cincinnati manufacturer that used a Chinese-made ingredient linked to 81 U.S. deaths earlier this year.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said yesterday that it took 11 lots of heparin from Celsus Laboratories that was contaminated with over-sulfated chondroitin sulfate (OSCS), a chemical used only to make fake blood thinner. The ingredient mimics heparin's anti-clotting properties but can cause severe allergic reactions and dangerously low blood pressure, according to reports the agency received beginning in January.
Aug 19, 2008 | 3
Scientists have created red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells, in a step that they say could mean an infinite source of blood for transfusions.
According to the American Red Cross, 15 million units of blood are donated in the U.S. each year. Fourteen million units are transfused into Americans every year. The World Health Organization notes that people still die—especially in developing countries—because of an inadequate blood supply.
The team at Worcester, Mass.-based Advanced Cell Technology (ACT) says that if they can develop type-O negative blood—so-called "universal donor" blood because the body's immune system will not reject it—there could be an inexhaustible supply. They were able to grow type A, type B, and type O blood, but did not make type O negative. ACT's chief scientific officer Robert Lanza told Wired News that he doesn't think it will be a problem to make oodles of O negative.
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