Why is there a blood shortage if there are always donation drives and family members are always there willing to provide for their loved ones if ever blood donation is needed?
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* You can’t store blood for very long, so we constantly have to get more donations or else we run out very quickly.
* With modern medicine, it’s quite possible for people to lose way more blood than it would take to kill them while they are being treated. I knew someone who was getting a tumor removed, and it was being fed by a major blood vessel. Every time the doctors clamped it, my friend went into cardiac arrest on the operating table, so instead they just left it partially open and bleeding the whole time they operated–keeping her blood pressure up with constant transfusions. My friend got like 8 or 10 units’ worth of blood, whereas you can only donate 2 units max at a time. So 5 to 10 people would have had to donate blood just for my friend to survive that one surgery.
* Not all blood types work for all people. The “universal donor” type is fairly rare. So if someone is dying and needs type O blood, it doesn’t really matter how much AB blood you have.
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