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Lying with a needle in his arm and parts of his blood
streaming into three separate bags, David Parsons is donating
platelets, which takes longer than donating whole blood, so he has
plenty of time to get philosophical. He says in his line of work he’s
rejected by 95 percent of the population. “You know you’re
helping to save lives, but you have to be a bit of a masochist in this
job,” says the veteran CEO of the Central Illinois Community Blood
Center, which serves 19 hospitals in 14 counties from its headquarters in
Springfield. The fact that only 5 percent of the population donates blood
is only one of his problems, he says: “Last year we had one of our
worst-luck years ever.”
I keep hearing on NewsChannel 20 that there’s
an “urgent need” for blood donors. It seems that the blood
center is always having some kind of problem causing a new “urgent
need.” Last year the bloodmobile caught fire and was out of service
for much of the year, resulting in a 10 percent decrease in donations. The
tornado last March knocked out a week of collections and put the whole town
in a bad mood — not good for the blood business. As soon as the
bloodmobile got running again, the December ice storm knocked out power for
two days and kept donors at home again. Besides all this, during the
Blagojevich years Springfield has lost thousands of state workers, who make
the best donors. Many of them now have become consultants, who see time as
money and don’t take the time to give, or service workers, who
can’t get off work without losing pay.
The blood center knows that it can’t be crying
“urgent need” to the media too often, or nobody will pay
attention. But whole blood only lasts 42 days and platelets only five days.
Like food, blood has an expiration date. You have to have too much to have
enough when you need it. Actually, because blood requires at least a day of
testing, you have to have it before you need it. Donors respond to a trauma such as 9/11, but
the only blood that could help those victims was donated by 9/10. A single
patient — for instance, a recent central-Illinois aneurysm case that
required 60 units of blood — can wipe out the entire supply of a
certain blood type. A trauma patient can sometimes need more than
200 units of blood, requiring donations from 200 people. When I visited the
blood center this week, the staff said there is currently no crisis in the
blood supply but that, partly because of the recent snowstorm, they are
below the three-day supply they like to have on hand — so, as usual,
there is an “urgent need.”
As Parsons and his staff keep trying to recruit more
donors, those in charge of making the nation’s blood supply ever
safer keep finding new reasons to disqualify some donor groups. Scientists
have recently learned that certain antibodies in the blood of women who
have ever been pregnant can cause a reaction in patients called
transfusion-related acute lung injury, or TRALI. Emphasizing that all women
donors are still needed to give blood, Parsons says that beginning this
fall, nationwide, most plasma products will only be taken from male donors.
“We’re going to try to have an all-male supply of plasma for
transfusion,” Parsons says, “but we still may need plasma from
women who are blood type AB.” At least one small group is being
partially brought back into the donor pool. Beginning in July, when the
state of Illinois starts regulating tattoo parlors, those who receive
tattoos will only be deferred from donating blood for a month, rather than
for a year, as is required when a tattoo is administered in an unregulated
parlor.
When Parsons started in the blood business, in 1971,
the only test on donated blood was for syphilis. Now donated blood is
subjected to 14 tests, including those for hepatitis B and C, West Nile
virus, HIV, and, still, syphilis. Each test adds to the lab fee paid by
participating hospitals for the blood. “Every donation costs us over
$200,” Parsons says, and tests on the blood account for $45 of that.
The Food and Drug Administration has recently approved a new test, for
Chagas disease, a bloodborne illness that mainly affects Latin Americans.
The Chagas test, which may be required sometime this year, could add $10 to
the cost of testing each unit of blood. But those costs are paid by the hospitals, their
patients, and insurance companies. The Central Illinois Community Blood
Center is that rare nonprofit group that doesn’t routinely ask you
for cash. “We ask for donations of blood, not money,” Parsons
says. If the center runs short of contributions, there are no foundations
handing out large grants of blood. Only people have what it needs —
so the blood center’s only hope is to keep appealing to you and me to
meet its “urgent need.”
To donate blood, call 217-753-1530 or set up an
appointment online at cicbc.org.
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Feb 15-21, 2007.
