Blood Donations?

I've read here about cattle mutilations and where all the blood is sucked out the poor animal.

Not to make light of a sensitive subject, but do we really use all of the blood collected at blood banks and blood drives?

www.aabb.org...

Each unit of blood consists of a volume of 450�500 milliliters, or about one pint. About 15 million units of red blood cells were donated in 2001

This is about a million gallons.
Now blood had a shelf life of about a month depending on what components your trying to use.

www.centralbloodbank.org...

All components of blood have a shelf life for human transfusion. Red blood cells, used for traumas, have a 42-day shelf life. Platelets, the clotting element in the blood that is used for cancer and leukemia patients, have a shelf life of 5 days. Plasma, which is mainly used for burn victims, has a shelf life of one year. Due to the shelf lives of the different components, this is the reason that your community continually is in need of blood.

Seems to me cattle mutilations decreasing.
Do we really use this enomous amout of blood?
Is this blood, that is ending it's shelf life, being used to feed an Alien race?

Boy, I sure would love to hear everyones comments.

We actually DO use 99% of blood components collected in blood drives.

I work in a blood bank in the central USA. Our region is responsible for supplying both the stock and emergent needs for 140 hospitals . . . stock being what they keep on their shelves (hundreds of units of various components for major Trauma Level 1 hospitals) to a couple OPOS and ONEGS for the very small town hospitals. When the small hospitals get close to the outdate time of any component, whether it is red blood cells or platelets, we fetch those units and hotfoot them over to the Trauma hospitals. Very, very rarely do we ever destroy units of red blood cells. If all else fails, we ship them for further manufacturing processes into serums and other things used in medicine. Platelets are a bit of a sticky wicket in that they only have a five day outdate - in some regions a three day outdate. We constantly move platelet pheresis packs about in order to prevent outdating them.

I suppose the greys and the drachominoids rely on missing persons and permanent abductions (oh, and MIA) for THEIR needs, because they sure as hell don't get them from us!

Now, if we start shipping hydrogen peroxide with large blood orders I will rethink this post. (c:


[edit on 30-11-2004 by Wyzyrd]

Thanks for the info, I happy to see someone from the community to respond.

I am no means trying to start a conspircy here, I was just digging for answers to nagging questions.

Once again thanks, I'd like to here more from other members in this field.

I was scared for a second this was about the mind controlling chips being inserted into blood donors lol...

This was debunked on mythbuster anyway