PSA—There seem to be a lot of blood drives going on across the region this week, and that usually means that generous folk are rolling up their sleeves, lying back, and getting pricked for the Red Cross.
But there’s something we learned more than a decade ago that a lot of people simply aren’t aware of, and we actually stumbled upon it by accident…and while the internet has largely been scoured of stories like this one, the fact remains that it’s true.
In 2001, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, folks were wanting to do anything/everything they could to help…an understandable human response to such a massive, multi-location event in which no one was certain what the victims actually needed. One of the things the locals over in Edwards County, where we were working at the time, continued to ask about was donating blood. The Red Cross was soon on the scene to respond to the multiple requests. So we decided to do a story about the blood drive, because we literally couldn’t imagine how blood taken in southern Illinois could possibly benefit people in New York City, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania…mainly because in some locations, there weren’t “wounded” so much as there were multiple deceased people.
And what we learned, when we started making calls and asking frank questions, kind of startled us.
As it turned out, many blood drives, especially in small-town southern Illinois, weren’t sending that blood to the “area of need,” nor were they, conversely, “keeping it local.” If you wanted your own blood saved, you had to make arrangements with a local storage facility and pay for the service…so nothing necessarily stayed local. If these weren’t the case, where was all this blood going?
Most of it was being sold to larger hospital and research facilities…essentially, to the highest bidder. When we asked the Red Cross spokesperson in Evansville why this was the case, she said that that was how the Red Cross funded their operations of goodwill. However, as it turned out, one of us just happened to have actually worked for the Red Cross, years ago. The “operations of goodwill” at that time were few and far between…for the amount of money they were raising with blood sales, one would think they could be a little more helpful, especially with military personnel (which is the venue of the employment at the time).
We produced a truthful article about “where the blood goes” for the paper where we worked at the time, and were told that it would not fly. We had to alter it completely, and not disillusion people that their donated blood wasn’t going, en masse, to people who needed it, but was being sold to the highest bidder (sometimes to another country). We were able to say that sometimes, blood wasn’t needed, and was simply thrown away. That pissed off some of the locals…but it was the truth, it was a quote from a spokesperson, and we were tired of altering our material so it was “easier for the readers to take.”
When I searched the internet for “don’t donate blood,” I found that others were sanitizing the truth as well. This is the only piece I was able to find, in a brief search, that told the truth. The Red Cross is a monolithic organization, and if you believe the internet can’t be scrubbed of negative press against such a “charity,” try finding out the reality of the American Cancer Society quickly and easily. I’d just about bet some of that “blood money” is used for internet scrubbing businesses, and that the link posted above will disappear fairly quickly after this article is posted (I’m saving the text of it in a Word document…just in case).
Bottom line: Don’t donate blood. You’re not helping anyone but the Red Cross; and if that appeals to you, then go right ahead. But if you’re actually worried about your own blood use, there are programs by which you can store your own blood for later use. Ask your health provider about them.