As the freezing rain, sleet and snow began to fall last weekend in the four state region, followed almost immediately by an arctic blast of brutally cold conditions, that winter storm created treacherous driving conditions which, in turn, has persisted through the week.
Those icy roads soon translated into a critical shortage of blood at the LifeShare Blood Center, headquartered in Shreveport. Mandi Johnson, with LifeShare, says the winter storm had an immediate impact on blood collection efforts. “We had to close down some of our donor centers and cancel a lot of our mobile blood drives."
Johnson says they are strongly encouraging donations to help with the immediate shortage, especially considering they’re down to a one-day supply. “LifeShare tries to collect 400 units of blood every single day. We try to have about three days’ worth of blood on our shelves. And so you only need to miss just only one day of collections; that puts you in a deficit." Johnson says this strain on inventory can be especially challenging at times like these for their supply of platelets, which have a short shelf life of five to seven days.
LifeShare serves as a critical regional hub of operations, managing the collection, processing, and distribution of blood components to more than 100 medical facilities in Louisiana, East Texas and South Arkansas. This is just the latest, in what has become an increasingly regular pattern of critically low blood supplies in recent years facing LifeShare, especially during the holidays and most notably during summer. LifeShare reports a 25% decrease in donations during the season.
LifeShare isn’t alone. The American Red Cross provides about 40% of the nation’s blood supply. According to the Red Cross, an estimated 6.8 million people in the U.S., which translates to roughly 3% of age-eligible people, actually donate blood every year. And with those donations, the American Hospital Association (AHA) says more than 4.5 million lives are saved by blood transfusions per year. The need is even greater when you consider that about 1 in 5 people admitted to the hospital will need blood.
But, sobering figures released by the American Red Cross in 2024 revealed that across the country blood donations have fallen 40% in just the past 20 years, and donors continue to skew older. With such a dramatic shift in behavior in just two decades, researchers have asked themselves, why? What exactly could be driving such a precipitous drop in blood donations?
If you go searching for answers, you might come across information provided by the University of Maryland Medical Center – Midtown Campus in Baltimore. They developed a webpage dedicated solely to answering this question. The site provided no simple ‘silver bullet’ solution or singular answer to the question. Instead, the site pared down their findings, of potential reasons for the growing aversion to blood donations, to a cluster of 10 factors:
- Fear or dislike of needles
- Too busy
- No one ever asked
- Already gave this year (FALSE; Myth)
- Afraid of getting AIDS (FALSE; Myth)
- Fear their blood isn’t the right type (FALSE; Myth)
- Don’t have any blood to spare (FALSE; Myth)
- Don’t want to feel weak afterward
- They won’t want my blood (FALSE; There’s blood testing)
- Rare blood type, so wait until special need (FALSE; Myth)
After you have used the hyperlink to check out the LifeShare Blood Center website, the AHA also recommends the websites below for additional information to help answer more detailed questions.
- AABB: www.wheretodonateblood.org
- America’s Blood Centers: www.americasblood.org
- American Red Cross: www.RedCrossBlood.org
