Blood Donations Fuel Big Business of Life-Saving

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Donors and centers are more prevalent than ever before.

On March 15, 1937, Dr. Bernard Fantus watched as a stranger walked into the Cook County Hospital in Chicago and allowed blood to be drawn from his arm.

The unnamed man was the first donor at the hospital’s new blood bank—the first of its kind in the United States—and created by Fantus as a potentially reliable and faster way for people to get blood transfusions.

Since that day nearly 88 years ago, blood donoring has grown from small community services to hundreds of national network collection sites in all 50 states—with January now serving as National Blood Donor Month.

And whether it’s upper coastal Maine, Key West, an isolated hamlet in the Midwest, or the farthest corner of the Aleutian Islands, the need for blood and blood donors is not only constant, the business of blood giving is growing to unprecedented heights.

“Every two seconds, someone in the U.S. needs blood,” Daniel Parra, media relations lead for the American Red Cross, headquartered in Washington, told The Epoch Times.

“Nearly 16 million blood components are transfused each year in the U.S., and these components cannot be manufactured. They can only come from volunteer donors.”

Harold Moore of Greenville, South Carolina, is one.

Donating since his West Virginia high school days in the 1970s, Moore told The Epoch Times that the biggest change he’s noticed is the number of donors.

“Back then, you almost never had to wait to donate,” Moore said. “Now the local center seems to have a lot of donors no matter when I go.”

And Moore would likely find that true almost anywhere.

America’s Blood Centers in Washington estimates that member organizations operate more than 700 blood collection sites in more than 1,100 communities, serving more than 3,500 hospitals and health care facilities across North America.

American Red Cross alone currently operates more than 200 donation centers nationally, with approximately 500 blood drives each day—making it the single largest supplier of blood and blood products in the United States, collecting and processing approximately 40 percent of the nation’s blood supply.

“And we open 5-to-10 new donation centers each year,” Parra said. “This number is influenced by several factors including donor engagement, market potential, and operational alignment.”

Plus, there are now many more potential donors.

At the time of Fantus’s experiment, the world’s population numbered approximately 2.1 billion, with about 128.8 million in the United States.

Since then, those numbers have grown by Huxley-ian proportions, with the world population now at about 8.2 billion and the United States hovers near 345 million.

In 1937, there were no donor centers in the United States: If someone needed a transfusion, donors and recipients had to be present together—and finding a matching donor was often a chore.

Now, the American Red Cross is only one of 90 hospital-based blood centers and 53 community blood centers registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

The Blood Connection (TBC), headquartered in Greenville, South Carolina, is the exclusive provider for all hospitals in the 10 counties of upstate South Carolina, and supplies blood for more than 120 hospitals, EMS units, and air transport services across South Carolina, North Carolina, Northeast Georgia, and Virginia.

On any given day, TBC’s Woodruff Road donation center can have as many as 200 donors—or only a handful.

But across all of its 18 regional collection centers and 50 mobile collection units, TBC needs about 1,000 pints of blood each day from donors to maintain the daily supply for all hospital partners.

“And there is never a day that goes by that a patient in a hospital doesn’t need a life-saving blood transfusion,” TBC CEO Delisa English told The Epoch Times.

Depending on the type of blood most needed in any given week, TBC currently pays donors between $30 and $80, with regular bonuses. Other donor groups pay different rates for either whole blood, platelets, or plasma—and all three are constantly in demand worldwide.

The United States, for instance, supplies about 70 percent of the world’s plasma.

Nearly 5 million Americans undergo blood transfusions each year for various medical conditions such as acute blood loss, surgery, hemophilia, or cancer.

“Because most transfusion prescriptions are for patients with relatively severe anemia, a blood shortage leaves doctors with no easy choices for withholding transfusion,” Parra said.

“Instead, they wrestle with a series of bad options—often facing the very real possibility that a patient could suffer due to a delayed transfusion.

But regardless of the need, or the evolving process, one thing remains unchanged: none of it is possible without donors.

“The need for blood is always going to be in demand,” English said.

“So please come donate, get rewarded for doing so, and know that at some point every pint you give is going to make a difference to someone in your community.”