Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save 2.4M babies | Hacker News Reader

Man donated blood every week for 60 years and helped save 2.4M babies

independent.co.uk

277 pointspmoriarty94 comments

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You know what? You can save lives even if you don't have some rare and newsworthy antibody in your blood.

All kinds of patients need whole blood and plasma.

Cancer patients need platelets.

There's only one place to get most of this stuff: human donors. So look here and go do it!

http://www.redcross.org/support/blood-donation

Donating blood is easy! It takes just a few minutes (for whole blood donation, plasma and platelets donation is more involved), and there are health benefits [1]. More than that, helping to save lives is a great way to start your day. Good feeling, good karma!

[1] https://www.medicaldaily.com/why-donating-blood-good-your-he...

>Good feeling

Until you pass out or get tired of all the spam mail begging you to donate again.

You should not pass out, and the mail/email can be easily unsubscribed from.

Almost no junk mail can be easily unsubscribed from in my experience.

I unsubscribed for almost all junk mail without any problem (save for spam, but that's different matter)...

How? Do you just write back and ask them to stop?

Many literally have a link at the bottom that says "unsubscribe". I've received emails from dozens of different services and companies over the past few years and every single one, without exception, has had this feature. It's prevalent enough that my email client even attempts to find it and presents me with a button in the UI if it does.

Notably CAN-SPAM act requires spam to have effective and visible unsubscribe links. While this doesn't impact off-brand Viagra and Nigerian prince spammers, most legitimate US businesses (such as American Red Cross) should be compliant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003

Ah, I thought we were discussing snail mail.

Why the minuses? I don't share my email all over the web, I usually don't sign up to many websites. If I do in majority of cases (99% I would say) there is included option to manage my subscriptions and/or unsubscribe directly from the message... and it works.

Every email that I have received from a legitimate organization in the past several years has had a one- or two-click unsubscribe link at the bottom. I can't get access to the Red Cross' reminder emails right now, but given what the Red Cross is, it's rather likely that the parent is telling the truth.

Edit: parent

Sorry, I meant physical mail not email.

My pressure sometimes would drop just after the donation while still in the seat, until I figured out it was due to dehydration; the one thing that solves the issue completely for me is drinking plenty of water the day before.

It's a little difficult. If you have type O blood the American Red Cross will bug you incessantly when you're able to donate again. While it's nice to be in demand, it's still annoying. You can ask them to knock it off but there's no option for once a month reminders.

I hate to say it but you are right about this. I donate frequently and encourage everyone who can to do it but the Red Cross spam operation is absolutely disgraceful they have zero shame.

If it works, isn't it more ethical to annoy people in this case?

It's annoying but I don't mind it like I do the daily business loan cold calls.

Obviously, don't donate blood if it causes you to pass out. But that's a pretty rare side effect, and mostly people can donate without any negative impact.

I'm just glad you were able to corellate saving lives and spam emails. /s

...those who donated blood a minimum of once a year had an 88 percent lower risk of heart attacks than those who did not donate.

Donating blood is one of the easiest thing you can do to prevent all kinds of cardiovascular disease! Thanks for the reminder, I will be going to donate.

And to think we called blood-letting quack medicine! :P

In related news, healthier people are more likely to donate blood. Cause vs effect.

This part of the article struck me as strange:

> You can reduce your blood viscosity by donating blood on a regular basis, which eliminates the iron that may possibly oxidize in your blood.

The whole reason why blood is red, why red blood cells carry oxygen, is because of the iron, which is oxidized to transport oxygen ... ?

Given that only healthy folks are allowed to donate blood, surely there's a fair amount of selection bias going on?

Drinking water reduces blood viscosity too. Or so I've been told.

I suffer from gout; there's a lot of theories about giving blood to help lower uric acid levels. Some people claim releif from symptoms after donating. In theory, it sounds plausable...

"Studies have shown that iron acts like a catalysis for the crystallization of uric acid. So if your iron serum levels are lower it will keep the uric acid in your blood longer to give your kidneys more time to remove it from your system."

https://www.reddit.com/r/gout/comments/70l8vp/reducing_uric_...

It's a disorganized sentence containing two separate notions. One is that having fewer red cells can reduce the viscosity of blood so it doesn't clot as readily, which is good for sedentary people. The other is that bleeding will reduce the overall age of red cells and thus reduce the amount of unusable methemoglobin, containing oxidized iron. Iron (II) is in hemoglobin, Iron (III) is in methemoglobin.

My old man actually _has_ to donate blood once a month due to excess iron from a condition.

Yup, I believe it’s called Hemochromatosis. I can’t find the source but I recall reading that donating blood also reduces cardiovascular risk.

Donating blood is easy for some people. Other people need to be celibate for a year.

Or forever, depending on the country.

Regular Blood donor in the UK but cannot give blood in NZ because of mad cow disease.. Even though I've been vegetarian for over 35 years!

What it amounts to is that there isn't really a shortage of donors (there are brief local shortages). So they are optimizing away really small risks.

Homosexual men are still banned from giving blood in many countries. In Sweden this changed less than 10 years ago. In Germany that changed in 2017, and in Austria they are still not allowed to give blood.

Same in Denmark, they're still not allowed. I donate as often as possible, for my homosexual friends who want to, but can't.

I donate platelets every month. It takes a while but you can watch a movie and it doesn't leave you feeling as drained as whole blood donation does. But which sort of donation does the most good is partially dependent on what your blood type is.

I actually like the light-headedness from donating blood. It's a mild little buzz, rather pleasant.

I wonder why they don't donate it to the patient? Or conversely, why they don't pay the donor at the hyper-inflated healthcare rates that everyone else in the "network" charges?

It costs money to draw, test, process, transport and infuse blood. The British healthcare system is single-payer and incredibly efficient, but an NHS hospital pays the NHS blood service £124.46 ($168.59) for a unit of red blood cells.

Paying donors for blood was a major contributory factor in the tainted blood scandal of the late 1980s and early 1990s; there's an unpleasantly large overlap in the Venn diagram of "people who are desperate for cash" and "intravenous drug users".

My ferritin levels are quite high, and anecdotally I started feeling better after I started donating blood. It's a win-win, so I donate as much as I can (which is every 3 months here).

They've also started sending a text message every time my blood has been used to help someone, which is one of the best warm and fuzzy feelings ever, that knowledge that you've made a genuine difference in some other person's life.

> Donating blood is easy!

Not if you have belonephobia/aichmophobia. I'm not sure how common that is, but I have it. I need a benzo (oxazepam, or stronger) before the needle.

There are other ways to do something good for society, and doing one good deed doesn't mean you're a good person (ie. a net positive karma, if you believe in such a thing). That's disillusioning yourself just like every form of donating does. Donating is not about you feeling good, it is about helping someone else. You feeling good is still a selfish reason.

What is wrong with being selfish?

That's a different debate.

I have a problem with the self-delusion that its an entirely selfless charity thing while the GP articulates selfish reasons such as "you will feel good" and "karma" (assuming the reader believes in such concept).

> Donating is not about you feeling good, it is about helping someone else.

It's about both. There is nothing wrong with feeling good for helping someone.

Of course, you need to actually have helped someone, but that goes without saying.

I actually used to occasionally feel weird about helping people because it made me feel good. I would sometimes even go out of my way to make sure I didn't feel good when helping, to try and do it in the most painful way possible.

What swapped me on that was that I realized I was often a more generous, effective helper when I could feed off the positive energy that came along with it.

I want to help people because they have inherent value, not for my own gain or status. So I asked myself, 'would the type of person who is completely selfless make themselves less effective as a helper just so that they could be assured that they were selfless?'

And of course they wouldn't. Being selfless is about considering other people to be more important than you. I was falling into the trap of treating my own moral status as the end goal; I was still considering other people to be less important than what I felt my actions said about me.

It's like when people assume that the opposite of pride is self-deprecation and then spend the exact same amount of time and energy obsessing over why they're bad at something.

That sounds like a self-enforced variant of do-gooder aversion, which seems to come standard in the human psyche.

Here's a template of a conversation I have to actively avoid:

> I'm making this lifestyle choice for ethical reasons

> You must feel superior!

> I guess that's a risk I'm willing to take?

The feeling good is a (possible) by-product of the goal: helping someone. When too much emphasis is put on that (possible) by-product it can cloud the moral value of the goal. F.e. how donating becomes a pissing contest in certain rich circles.

Well sure, feeling good is not the end goal and shouldn't become the end goal. That doesn't mean it should be dismissed or avoided.

Tasting good is not the end goal of food, nutrition is. I think the pushback might make more sense thinking about it that way. Suppose the OP had written a post talking about how healthy kale was:

> "It's super healthy, and if you cook it right, it tastes amazing too!"

> "That's disillusioning yourself just like every form of cooking does. The point of healthy eating is not to satisfy your taste buds."

Lots of things in the world can become a trap, but that doesn't mean they should always be avoided. I think sometimes people forget that empathy and morality are work. It takes reinforcement. Being "good" is something you learn and practice, it's not a binary switch you turn on and off.

So in other words, if I'm Cookie Monster, and I'm on the fence about donating blood, and somebody tells me that the Red Cross always supplies free cookies afterwards (and even apple juice sometimes, heck yeah) and that's just enough to push me over the fence to donate blood - good. I'm glad someone told me that then. I'm going to take advantage of any instinct that makes me more likely to help someone.

And, yeah, maybe it'll become a problem sometime and I'll not want to help out with an event that doesn't have free cookies. Then I'll switch to a variable reward schedule to help ingrain the habit, or I'll start weaning myself off of cookies, or whatever. But the point is to start somewhere.

If I start doing sit-ups, I'm absolutely going to have someone hold my feet because my core strength isn't going to be there at the beginning. Empathy is a muscle; treat it like one.

Another way of looking at it is that the people you are helping usually don't care about your internal morality. So by all means, focus on your internal morality - but only if it doesn't get in the way of you helping them. During a blood shortage, you get no moral points for saying "well, I didn't donate blood because I didn't think I could do it in a truly selfless way."

I don't understand your approach of pointing out that someone didn't enumerate all the exceptions of their general statement.

What about people with bloodborne pathogens, those who share needles, or people on space stations? It's not easy for them to donate either but you didn't mention them.

Please avoid creating a world where we have to belabor every statement with "(there are exceptions btw)." Instead, you need to realize there are always exceptions.

There are not always exceptions, and I don't think my exception is being considered when someone makes a statement like that (though AFAICT far more common than people on space stations). What I mentioned isn't well covered, accepted. So I found it worthwhile to mention that exception not to prove that the statement is false but to give an example of an exception to a rule of thumb. One I obviously care about. Please don't tell me when I am or am not allowed to express my concern; I am free to appreciate nuances to extreme PoVs/statements. _Generally_ I'd say I value them. You're free to not care about [such an] exception.

These appeals to saving lives would be entirely unnecessary with just one small fix.

The supply of blood would be dramatically increased if the United Blood Services would simply pay $50 per unit. After testing and transportation, a unit of blood costs hospitals about $400. With transfusion services, the hospital charges the patient between $1400 and $3000 depending on provider. Adding a mere $50 to that in order to permanently solve supply constraints would be a huge win for everybody.

Part of why I don't donate blood is that the Red Cross has a history of misappropriating funds and hasn't been honest about how their money has been used.

It's been a multibillion dollar industry for decades, and it sure seems to me that I'd donate my time and blood only to enrich other people.

I would hope only a very small part. Sure, don't give money, but it's not like your blood will be diverted to some offshore blood haven. It's one of the few things you can be pretty sure will be given to people in need.

> will be given to people in need.

Given or sold? Big difference there. If sold, then it is pretty much the same as giving ARC the equivalent amount of money.

On their finance sheet maybe, but not in terms of lives saved.

I believe the point for not paying for donating blood is to prevent people from lying about their health when donating. Anyway, saving a life should be far more valuable than 50 bucks.

BTW, a huge win for everybody would be not to have to pay ridiculous amounts for a bag of donated blood.

> Cancer patients need platelets.

If I donate blood will cancer patients get the blood/platelets/etc. for free or will my blood be sold at a profit at some level of healthcare bureaucracy?

Unfortunately this is a big issue in many places around the world.

https://www.smh.com.au/healthcare/final-donation-for-man-who...

> The 81-year-old's plasma contains a potent antibody used to create a remarkable treatment known as Anti-D that protects unborn babies from the potentially deadly Rhesus D Haemolytic Disease (HDN).

...

> But he has already surpassed the donor age limit and the Blood Service made decision to protect his health.

^ He has to stop soon for health reasons.

Here's a thought experiment, if we hypothetically have access to medicinal records, details etc. of all humans on the earth - would it mean we'd have a treatment for all diseases?

About thought experiment... if you had N random dots on a board and randomly threw M arrows at it, would it hit all dots? I would expect N >> M for your thought experiment because such diversity is rare, not a rule.

No, this is a disease like few others. When a mother and father's blood type only varies by the positive or negative part there's a chance that from the second pregnancy onwards the mother can react to the fetus's blood.

Compare that to the cold, a virus; mad cow diseaase, a prion; strap throat/etc, a bacteria, huntingdon's disease, a genetic flaw. Nothing could work on all of them. CRISPR shows that some solutions are only a method to a personalised treatment.

To your thought experiment: No. Why not?

Making the connections between medical records and treatments is called "medical research." There's a vast amount of research left to do.

Medical records aren't complete or accurate, even if it was OK to share them all. People who donate blood in the 21st century sign a release granting permission to analyze their blood to search for factors needed, like particular antibodies, and to send their blood where it matches the need.

(They got a specific hit on my blood once, for a particular patient I guess. They asked me to come and donate every three days for about three weeks.)

There’s no shortage of startups hoping for this, but it looks like more hype than hope. The one that first comes to mind is Arivale, which seems like it was named right out of Silicon Valley season 1.

This seems like an awfully important cause! Why are they sitting and hoping someone will do it selflessly? That is risky, I feel.

Why not instead have, say, the government or a charity pay someone with this profile 100k a year to go donate blood once a week?

Yes, hopefully someone would just do it, but it does feel like the upside is strong enough that investing some money would be worthwhile. Hell, I hate needles with a passion but I would sign up for donating weekly for the rest of my life for 100k a year, I am sure orhers would as well.

Maybe a patreon or a gofundme or something?

You’d have to find such a person first. From the article, there were a unique set of circumstances that doctors don’t even truly understand that led to his blood having these properties.

That was then. He may have unusually high levels, I'm not sure, but donors are induced to produce the antibodies these days (they volunteer and it takes a while to build up production and so on).

Actually, the assumption that paying people will result in more blood is perhaps more problematic. The research seems to indicate that people actually like to donate. Although, work is ongoing.

http://freakonomics.com/2013/06/05/is-paying-for-blood-a-goo...

Quote:

    The position and guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO) and several national blood collection agencies for nearly 40 years have been based on the view that offering economic incentives to blood donors is detrimental to the quantity and safety of the blood supply. The guidelines suggest that blood should be obtained from unpaid volunteers only. 

    However, whether economic incentives positively or negatively affect blood donations (and other prosocial activities) has remained the subject of debate since the positions were established.

    Evidence consistent with the WHO position came originally from uncontrolled studies using nonrandom samples and, subsequently, from surveys and laboratory studies indicating that economic incentives can “crowd out” (decrease) intrinsic motivations to donate and can attract “worse” donors.

That's a different thing than is being suggested though, I believe. That study sounds like something along the lines of a "Come donate and get $50" type of arrangement. The parent's suggestion was more along the lines of specifically targeting individuals that have e.g. O blood or rare properties in their blood, removing the likelihood of quality going down.

It's an interesting ethics issue.

I'm sure there are people out there who would be more than happy to have their "job" be providing blood or other things like it. And I think it would probably benefit society as a whole for something like it.

But it does seem like it could very VERY easily go south really fast. And there are a lot of ethical issues with it (like a salaried-donator wouldn't be able to do anything to risk the health of that blood at any time, and would it be okay for someone to permanently change their body to better accommodate something like that? What about temporarily change their body?)

> would it be okay for someone to permanently change their body to better accommodate something like that?

Many professionals in other fields already permanently change their bodies to better suit their profession. I don't see why a full-time Blood Donator would be any different.

That's an interesting hypothetical, but there's no way someone could donate blood "full time" to earn a living wage. There's an upper bound to how fast one can produce blood, and a high proportion of people are capable of doing it, so each person can represent at most a miniscule proportion of total supply. It would be like making a career out of football if almost everyone were equally fit and talented and lots of people played all the time for fun and there were no NFL.

But what if we could we increase the amount of blood someone can donate. I know something roughly similar is done when donating marrow.

What if we could augment humans to be able to produce absurd amounts of blood and make it so it was a full-time job for those people?

If we could increase the amount of blood someone could donate by 100x, would it start to become cheaper to just hire full-time donors rather than deal with all the expenses around donations? And would it be ethical even if the donors we're fully consenting and paid a good salary?

Like you said, its a interesting hypothetical to say the least!

I was literally just looking in to starting blood donations again, now that I have a flexible remote job (I stopped when I had kids, and time got expensive).

As a shot in the dark, does anyone here know how the different donation orgs (red Cross, heartland, etc.) stack up against each other? I'm having trouble finding unbiased sources, and am curious if the organizations vary greatly in ethics/profit strategies/proficiency of staff, etc.

I’d like to help out too. Though I’ll admit I wasn’t thinking of it much until this thread. I also searched a bit but am wanting of more info on where best to donate.

EDIT: US donors can find a place to donate here https://www.redcross.org/give-blood. Almost every modern country has a “where to donate” website.

Long-time A+ donor here, not as long. Platelets donation takes time and uses a large needle, but can be done every week. Whole blood uses a smaller needle and can be done every 8 weeks. Private blood donation clinics tend to have better snacks and shiny new everything. Stanford’s main blood donation center was adequate but unremarkable last time I was there.

I was rather excited to find out that I had a rare blood type and that donations are so easy and that I live near a clinic. My regular visits are quite rewarding. It feels good to matter for more than the tickets closed this week.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17051076

Semi-related question: is the reason smaller people can't donate smaller quantities of blood that transfusion volumes are completely standardized and odd quantities of blood not practically usable? I ask as someone who's never been close to passing the (apparently universal in the US) 115lb threshold and maybe never will.

The bags contain a specific amount of anticoagulant and require 450ml blood. There's about 90ml blood per kg body weight, so a 50kg person has 4500ml. It's safe to donate 10%. The cutoff in the US is actually 110lbs (50kg).

The exact weight requirement varies. At my blood center, for the kind of donations I do, it's actually 114 lbs, for some reason.

I'd guess that the extra 4lbs is a safety margin for scale accuracy and the weight of clothing.

I'm not sure. Curiously, some types of donation (whole, and double-red apheresis) have a minimum of 110 pounds here, while others (apheresis platelets, plasma) have a minimum of 114 pounds. I'd think if they were worried about scale accuracy or clothing weight, the same safety margin would apply to all donation types -- or at least all apheresis donations.

It's because the preservatives in the bag intended to receive your blood only work correctly if they're in the right proportion. They're included presuming a full donation.

So when the donation is aborted (e.g., the needle hits a valve or skin plug) and they only get part of a unit, but say the partial donation can still be used for research, how does that work? Do researchers not care if the blood is extra-anti-coagulated?

Last time I gave a partial donation I was told it would be unused.

It would be nice if they could deliver the blood to researchers but there might be challenges regarding the chain of custody, or donor history/privacy. Partial donations are probably rare enough not to try overcoming those challenges.

50 * 60 is 3000. Can 3000 donations really save millions of babies?

>The 81-year-old Australian has donated more than 1,100 times since turning 21.

>Because his blood has unique disease-fighting antibodies, it is used to create an injection which combats rhesus disease – a condition where the blood of pregnant women attacks their unborn babies.

Yes. Each donation is subdivided

Probably not. It seems the antibodies from multiple donors are pooled, so each donation could contribute to saving lots of lives that way.

There's probably also some fun multiplication, as giving the antibodies to a mother protects her future pregnancies rather than the current pregnancy or the mother.

Austrailia has about 300,000 births a year, or 20 million in the last 60 years.

Seems unlikely that austrailia would have a 5% miscarriage rate if he hadn't donated blood. With risk that high it's something you'd expect to know about widely, with at least 1 in 50 mothers receiving the injection

Rh disease is taught about in high school, and is one of the first things doctors check for. If a woman is of type negative blood, then she will likely have been told as a young girl that her children may be at risk depending on the father.

I guess what I’m saying is — rh disease is probably the most widely known and treated complication of pregnancy

Why is this antigen so rare? Is it not something that can be grown and manufactured in a lab. We know of at least a few people that produce it naturally, have studies been done to simulate the process that occurs naturally?

Sadly, donating blood is not always so easy, especially if you're an LGBT person.

Over 1100 donations from his right side. I wonder what his arm looks like. After getting stuck that many times would it be easier to just put in a central line?

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