Blood Donors Needed

After thinking about the fact that because people I will never know have donated blood in another country, my daughter is getting to benefit, I realized I need to get back to making donations while I still can.

For Canadians, you can go here to find a clinic near you:
http://www.blood.ca/centreapps/clinics/InetClinics.nsf/CVSE?OpenForm&CloseMenu

I posted on another site, where yesterday's discussion was about blood donations, about Julie and the fact she had something special about her blood but I didn't know what it was. Another blogger commented:

Cindy writes of her daughter, "She also had/didn't have (I don't remember which) something in her blood so hers could be used for high risk infants."

Probably she doesn't have cytomegalovirus (CMV), a virus that is widespread in the adult population in the US and probably elsewhere. CMV is thought to be mostly harmless in most people, but premature infants, and immuno-suppressed patients, are among the exceptions. 

The estimates I can readily find of the CMV infection rate have a sizable error bar, but even the most optimistic ones are pretty big, like 50% of Americans 40 and older. Some estimates go as high as 80%. Once you get it, you have it, probably asymptomatically, for life. 

Having CMV doesn't exclude you -- it just makes the blood unsuitable for certain patients, so they test the donated blood for it.

So, for a high risk infant, you can multiply a modest sized number (the percentage of CMV negative population) by another (the percentage of people with the requisite blood type and Rh) and get a small number. 

And then the number gets even smaller. It is now estimated that perhaps 38% of Americans are eligible to donate (within the
age limits, healthy enough, and able to make it through the ever
longer list of risk criteria). This is a big restatement,
downward, of the longstanding assumption:
http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500368_162-3124486.html

But wait, there's less! It is estimated that on a nationwide average, only 5% of the eligible population gives blood at least once a year.

So even somebody like me, a ketchup-common O-positive and, since they never mentioned it, pesumably a CMV carrier, is doing something for the public good by giving blood. If you have a rare blood type AND are free of CMV, you can go ahead and visualize a premature baby somewhere who is alive because of you, which is a warm fuzzy even warmier and fuzzier than other blood donors get.