So… I don’t usually add to posts but as someone who a) is an actual blood banker and b) has thought EXTENSIVELY about vampires in the context of working in a blood bank, I do feel the extreme urge to systemically rip this argument into shreds because while it is an interesting thought, it’s also giving the blood banking system (at least in the US) far more credit than it deserves because my dudes? Blood banks waste SO MUCH BLOOD on a daily basis for any number of reasons, including:
• Outdating. Red blood cells are treated to be shelf stable for up to 42 days; after that, it’s considered unsafe to transfuse and unfortunately has to be tossed. In a high volume hospital and/or one with a large trauma center outdating this might be rare, but in smaller hospitals with lower volumes, outdating units before they can get transfused happens pretty regularly, especially for more uncommon blood types like B or AB.
• (side note, if you’re thinking wait isn’t AB the universal donor blood type? not quite! blood when processed can get split up into three component parts: red cells (the actual blood cells), plasma (the liquid matrix in which blood cells are suspended, which is mostly water), and platelets (the things that help blood clot). AB is the universal donor type for PLASMA, but AB red cells can only be given to people of the same blood type, which are about 5% of the population.)
• Temperature. Part of prolonging the shelf life of red cells is keeping them at refrigerator temperature, which is defined as between 1C-10C. If a unit goes outside that temp, it’s generally considered unusable and will have to be wasted. This most often happens when blood is sent to a floor and then the unit isn’t used which happens…. way more often than you’d think and definitely more often than it should for a variety of reasons. Often it’s because it was thought the blood would be needed and then isn’t, like in cases of OB hemorrhage, massive bleed, or surgery, but sometimes it’s just because a provider decided they didn’t want the blood after all and then don’t tell us until the unit is already out of temp which is… fun. That’s a fun phone call to have. It can also happen if blood gets sent to the wrong place and doesn’t make it to the patient until it’s already out of temp, which is also a fun call to have.
• Speaking of OB hemorrhages and surgeries: hospital blood banks often have to deal with patients needing high volumes of blood and QUICKLY. Colloquially this could be referred to as ‘bleeding out’; in blood bank terms, it’s usually known under the term ‘massive transfusion’. In these instances, blood banks tend to just give the floors what they ask for because obviously they don’t want to risk the patient fully bleeding out, but not every massive transfusion is going to use every product sent to them. Products that don’t get used will get sent back to the blood bank, and as mentioned above, if they’re out of temp, they have to get tossed.
• Infectious diseases. This part happens at the donor org levels. Red blood cells are vigorously tested to ensure the safety of the product before being sent to hospitals for all manor of things, including common blood borne pathogens like HIV, Hep B, Hep C, TB, CMV, etc. which a donor may not even know they have (thus why orgs like the American Red Cross can’t just take people’s word for if they’re blood is actually safe). If a unit is flagged for anything that could make it unsafe to transfuse, it gets tossed.
• Quality issues. These types of problems won’t usually be caught until the unit is already at the hospital. Sometimes it’s simply an issue like the red blood cells in a unit bursting due to improper storage; burst red blood cells are of absolutely no use to a patient and thus the unit has to gets tossed. Other times it happens after a unit has been transfused to a patient and causes some kind of reaction. You may know that giving a patient the wrong blood type could kill them; what you probably don’t know is that there’s a whole lot of other things in blood that can cause a myriad of problems, often referred to as ‘transfusion reactions’. Most often this happens because something in the blood unit caused an immune reaction in the patient, but it could also happen because of bacterial contamination, or a pathogen in the unit that got missed during testing (rare, but possible). If the reaction happens early and the full unit hasn’t been transfused, the remainder gets sent back to the blood bank for testing, and once testing is complete, the unit gets tossed because you can’t issue an already open unit to a patient.
• Speaking of open units, improper bag spiking. This actually happens on the floors and not the blood banks; nurses have to puncture (“spike”) blood bags for transfusion and sometimes they do it wrong. An improperly spiked bag is no longer considered safe to transfuse, so it gets tossed.
In conclusion, vampires taking blood from blood banks is NOT unethical, and in fact would actually be a huge cause for celebration amongst blood bankers because they would no longer have to grapple with the tremendous guilt they feel throwing away units when they know how critical the blood supply is.
(Also blood bank aside, labs in general toss huge amounts of blood tubes from patients every day once testing on them is done, which also amounts to large volumes of blood thrown away. So really, vampires would make ideal lab techs, especially since they’d have to work the chronically understaffed night shifts.)
