blood donation

[danchip]

i have asked a number of medical proffesionals this question and never got the same answer so here goes

we all hear about how short blood supplies are and we need to donate more,

so why when a person dies can surgeons harvest the organs and not the blood to

[sqad617]

After death, the blood clots almost immediately and losses its clotting mechanism.....hence no good for transfusion.

Clottedblood would be difiicult type and hence could not be transfused.

Logistic of "sucking out" a pint of blood from a dead person, putting it into a bottle and never using it for the above reasons, speak for themselves.

P.S Dracula solved the problem....didn't he?

[LazyGun]

Actually, transfusions of cadaveric blood did occur, mostly in Russia, in the 30s, and the results of such transfusions helped in developing the anticoagulants and preservatives that are now present in donated blood. It never really caught on though, and live donors are much preferred.

Harvested donor organs are usually transfused within a matter of hours of being collected, and are kept in O2 perfusion fluids. Some harvested tissue can be stored, but not organs.

Live donors can be repeat donors, you can screen them for infectious diseases and other transfusion hazards on an ongoing basis, and more importantly there are more live people out there to fulfil demand!

The current number of registered donors in the UK is around 1.4 million - you would need an awful lot of dead people to make any sort of significant contribution :)

Go on, do something amazing - become a blood donor!

[sqad617]

Thanks for the information Lazy Gun

[danchip]

i do give blood as often as possible, i just know they always are advertising the fact that they never have enough so thought this may be a good way of topping up the blood banks