BLOOD FOR TRANSFUSIONS

Evening Star, Issue 25895, 12 September 1946, Page 10

BLOOD FOR TRANSFUSIONS

DEMAND EXCEEDING SUPPLY “ Between the years 1941 and 1945 the blood requirements for transfusion purposes have doubled, and the society is accomplishing a wonderful job, of which not enough is heard, but the demand for blood is beginning to exceed the supply.” So said Dr M. McGeorge, who is in charge of the blood bank at the Dunedin Public Hospital, during the course of an address on the work of the Dunedin Voluntary Blood Transfusion Society to the .Junior Chamber of Commerce last night. Mr 11. V. Foster was in the chair. Since the inception of the society 12 years ago 4,109 donations of blood had been made by members, and valuable assistance had been given by women, especially during the war, Dr McGeorge said. A blood bank to cope with immediate needs was maintained at the Hospital, and it was only on isolated occasions that members were summoned to the Hospital at short notice. Their assistance in emergency cases, however, had often been the direct cause of saving life. The society was voluntary, he said, there being no question of payment to donors, who were never calledVipon more than once in three months. It could he safely said that no ill effects followed a donation of blood, complete regeneration taking about two weeks. The speaker gave a brief resume of the experiments leading up to the modern methods of blood transfusion, remarking that in the first stages of development —the Elizabethan period—many persons died, until it was discovered that blood could not be given from one person to another indiscriminately. At- length the four types— A, B, AB. and o—were discovered. Advances in blood transfusion flourished during wars, he said, and from the modest introduction in 1916 to the plasma system in the recent war there had been a great advance. Mortality had been considerably reduced, and the benefits of blood transfusion had been comparable with those of penicillin and the sulpha drugs.