James Harrison, whose blood donations saved >2M babies, has died
npr.org
npr.org
>According to Lifeblood, 17% of Australian women who become pregnant end up needing anti-D injections — and most of the country's supply comes from a pool of less than 200 regular plasma donors.
This was the most shocking part of this article though. I've never heard of "anti-D" but it sounds incredibly needed and that's a very small supply.
What they don't say is whether these 200 donors constitute more or less than 100% of the clinical need for anti-D plasma.
If my contributions were that valuable, I'd wonder if it made sense to keep me on life support just to extract my blood every two weeks. But alas, blood donors in Australia must be 81 years or younger, so I guess the question is academic in this case.
It's a really interesting somewhat thought provoking idea. To some extent these people are valuable enough that turning them into blood factories after cerebral death is the more moral option?
If he consented when he was alive, I don't see how it could be moral to ignore his wishes and let more people die as a result.
I guess laws will get in the way of this kind of thing though.
I can see it from a "yes" perspective and from a "no" perspective, and I can find reasons to regret saying either. Agency, autonomy and compassion are critical features of the scenarios that have the least regrets.
At the bottom of that article it indicated they've successfully recreated the antibody in a lab, I hope that saves a lot of families from suffering.
On the list of "best options" for my vegetative body, this would rate fairly highly.
But yeah, like assisted suicide, there are people with non-aligned motives who could be incentivized to coerce a decision from weak/befuddled/old patients.
There are many decisions I'd like to make now, while of sound mind and body, that I would like to be respected when I am no longer able to make decisions for myself. The state allows some of them, but not all.
we already turn people into transplant organs source, so i don't see much difference between harvesting a kidney, heart or blood
> Once you’re 81 you must have donated in Australia in the last 5 years to remain eligible.
https://www.lifeblood.com.au/faq/eligibility/other/age?_gl=1....
(That’s the nastiest long URL I’ve ever seen. All I did was click the “find out more” link here: https://www.lifeblood.com.au/blood/eligibility/quiz )
(It's probably just a load of analytics & tracking gumpf, maybe 'ga' = Google Analytics, I don't know.)
More info here if you want: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10071811
But there is also monoclonal antibodies for cancer, and this antibody production looks somewhat similar.
I tried doing it too but it's a lot more involved. I don't have this anti-D thing though. Just normal blood.
You need to go through an interview, a medical check and various forms.
Once I went through all that they told me I can't give any :(. Multiple sex partners, regular tattoos etc. I did want to and was prepared to do it regularly. I can see how they are having difficulty getting enough. But anyway I tried.
I wish they were better at screening blood so I could help.
[1] https://www.lifeblood.com.au/blood/learn-about-blood/plasma/...
Then I moved to east coast, and there is basically none of that infrastructure, you have to find a mobile blood bank or be aware of some event or community site that sometimes hosts them. I'm bad at that kind of community awareness, so the upshot is I haven't donated once in the 15 years I've lived here. Always surprised by that since there are so many more people on the east coast, I'm not sure where all the blood is coming from since they are so bad about getting people to do regular donations.
https://www.giveapint.org/ Locations in Pottstown/Exton, plus St Luke's Hospital
Red Cross, lots coming up: https://www.redcrossblood.org/give.html/drive-results?dt=WB:...
Supposedly CHOP has locations too. They do wonderful work.
I grew up in lower bucks. There were no dedicated blood centers. Before I was 22 I had never donated at anything but a mobile bloodbank. My parents hauled themselves to mobile blood banks whenever they wanted to do it. The first actual dedicated blood center I donated at was blood centers of the pacific in San Francisco. I was shocked that someone would actually build a dedicated site just for donating blood. But then later I saw Oregon did it too.
Also there's this: https://www.inquirer.com/health/blood-donation-shortage-phil...
There is also no selection bias. I said that in the 90's there were several near West Chester and KoP. You say ChesCo is the wealthiest. Wealth in ChesCo is entirely concentrated within the KoP; West Chester; and Valley Forge area. Which would be accurate to what I said. I did not grow up anywhere near there, rather in a very poor region, which is most of the county. It is a large county.
On the one hand, people should get compensation for their labor, especially since he's probably saving the healthcare system from having to do more-expensive/less-effective interventions. On the other hand, being treated like an employee sucks, so maybe it's for the best.
Where I live, blood centers take the middle road by giving us rewards-points we can exchange for gift cards, but that adds the complication of having to manage gift cards.
This is something I find hard to agree with. I understand banning say selling of body parts (even your own). But blood / plasma?
Downside is less people donate, but I don't think $10 would change that much.
The red cross also has their "rewards" program but it's nonsense stuff like water bottles. I think you can exchange points for Amazon gift cards. Like $15/year.
This is not a fair judgement in this situation. I think money is a far more perverse incentive for donating blood than snacks. Also the snacks are more about helping people increase their blood sugar after giving blood than incentivizing them.
To assume good faith here I'd have to assume wherever you are you've never donated blood?
When you donate blood you've lost a pint of fluids. They give you something to drink to work on rehydrating.
The sugar in the juice and the sugary snacks are to help give you a bit of energy since... you just lost a pint of blood.
Which is to say this is pretty standard everywhere. It's not payment. The ice pack after my vasectomy wasn't "payment for population control". It's healthcare.
Any downsides?
Suppose you were to legalize euthanasia for blood donors. i.e. you could earn the right to assisted suicide after 5 years of regular donations, no questions asked. That way the religious lobby gets shut up because the blood is maintaining the population rate and the chronic mentally ill like myself can have a comfortable exit.
The bureaucracy plays it safe by just banning payment, even though people like James aren't in that risk category.
Now if you are talking about undetectable or uncommon I could understand, but that just shows a fault in the testing process.
This is why you get a questionary every time asking whether you had unprotected sex, recently had a tattoo, etc.
I made an extra $100/mo that way in uni and it paid for a lot of beer (or 1/5th of a uni textbook).
> Despite making up just 4.2 per cent of the world's population, the United States accounts for around 70 per cent of all the source plasma in the world blood market, according to most analysts.
> As it stands, the only countries in the world that are entirely self-sufficient for immunoglobulin are those that offer to pay their plasma donors.
> In 2022-23, Australia imported $399.2 million worth of immunoglobulin to make up the shortfall in supplies, buying plasma products at what Mr Cahill calls "world-best prices".
So I drove home: the NHS are more strict than the DVLA.
I do wish they'd expand the testing a bit. I think a lot of people would donate if it came with a metabolic panel, for example.
If you get blood panel results with a "donation", it's an exchange of value, not a donation.
See: various blood-donation-borne disease scandals in history.
Nobody seems to ask for those positions to all become volunteer/unpaid.
Nevertheless, there seems enough blood from a donation-only system, but not so for plasma (or most other live donation systems).
James Harrison, blood donor whose rare plasma saved babies, dies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43242328
And most people wouldn't be happy with a needle permanently tapped into their vein, so not really viable.
> He made his last donation in May 2018, surrounded by half a dozen grateful mothers holding babies who benefited from the anti-D program.
> In this randomized clinical trial of 285 firefighters, both blood and plasma donations resulted in significantly lower PFAS levels than observation alone. Plasma donation was the most effective intervention, reducing mean serum perfluorooctane sulfonate levels by 2.9 ng/mL compared with a 1.1-ng/mL reduction with blood donation, a significant difference; similar changes were seen with other PFASs.
I sometimes think that "yes we are all equal" but in a (animal farm positive spin) some people are "simply better than me" and in those people I include Jane Goodall, and a few others. Well that list just got one more member. If you save a life you get a big point in my list. If you have been saving lives for 60 years, you get all the points.
On top of that, (again I didn't expand on the reading for the topic) I didn't get a sense that the guy was asking (and getting) millions for his donations, for which I would give him even more points!!!
Inspirational figure.
Thanks for posting this! I’m going to try to donate blood more often! It’s a good way to help others.
Thanks for sharing it.
TIL, there's something called "anti-D" plasma.
I really should give blood; I've resisted it all my life because my blood type isn't rare (A+), and I have an extremely strong phobia of needles, where if I see one pricking me I risk vomiting.
I can suck it up enough to get a vaccine, and I do get my flu shots and boosters every year, but it has made the prospect of donating blood considerably less enticing. That's pretty selfish though, I should just suck it up and donate it...though I'm definitely not going to do it every two weeks like this guy.
Source: the red cross hounds me for platelets and plasma.
No, really; it's not like a lot of work to donate blood, if there's a blood drive at your workplace or somewhere else convenient, it's just a little uncomfortable and maybe you take it easy for a couple of days after.
So just reveling in the vainglorious satisfaction of feeling better than all those other selfish people who didn't SAVE ANY LIVES that day can be enough to outweigh the mild discomfort and bit of time you spent on the process, so the next time you see the blood drive you can look forward to the impending smugness rather than dreading the inconvenient obligation.
If you're one of the universal donor types (O and AB), they sometimes prefer to do a double-red or plasma donation, which can be done every 16 or 4 weeks. I believe platelets can be donated every week or two, but I don't know if there's a preferred blood type for those.