-
Selling Blood Is Big BusinessAwake!—1990 | October 22
-
-
Selling Blood Is Big Business
RED GOLD! As the nickname implies, this is one highly valued substance. It is a precious fluid, a crucial natural resource that has been compared not only to gold but also to oil and coal. However, red gold is not mined from veins in the rocks with drills and dynamite. It is mined from the veins of people by much subtler means.
“Please, my little girl needs blood,” implores a billboard that looms over a busy avenue in New York City. Other advertisements urge: “If you’re a donor, you’re the type this world can’t live without.” “Your blood counts. Lend an arm.”
People who want to help others evidently do get the message. They line up in droves, worldwide. No doubt most of them, as well as the people collecting the blood and the people transfusing the blood, sincerely want to help the afflicted and believe that they are doing so.
But after blood is donated and before it is transfused, it passes through more hands and undergoes more procedures than most of us realize. Like gold, blood inspires greed. It may be sold at a profit and then resold at a larger profit. Some people fight over the rights to collect blood, they sell it at exorbitant prices, they make fortunes from it, and they even smuggle it from one country to another. The world over, selling blood is big business.
In the United States, donors were once paid outright for their blood. But in 1971 British author Richard Titmuss charged that by thus luring the poor and sick to donate blood for the sake of a few dollars, the American system was unsafe. He also argued that it was immoral for people to profit from giving their blood to help others. His attack prompted an end to the paying of whole-blood donors in the United States (although the system still thrives in some lands). Yet, that did not make the blood market any less profitable. Why?
How Blood Remained Profitable
In the 1940’s, scientists began to separate blood into its components. The process, now called fractionation, makes blood an even more lucrative business. How? Well, consider: When dismantled and its parts sold, a late-model car may be worth up to five times its value when intact. Similarly, blood is worth much more when it is divided up and its components are sold separately.
Plasma, which makes up about half of the blood’s total volume, is an especially profitable blood component. Since plasma has none of the cellular blood parts—red cells, white cells, and platelets—it can be dried and stored. Furthermore, a donor is allowed to give whole blood only five times a year, but he can give plasma up to twice a week by undergoing plasmapheresis. In this process, whole blood is extracted, the plasma separated, and then the cellular components are reinfused into the donor.
The United States still allows donors to be paid for their plasma. Moreover, that country permits donors to give about four times more plasma annually than the World Health Organization recommends! Little wonder, then, that the United States collects over 60 percent of the world’s plasma supply. All that plasma in itself is worth about $450 million, but it fetches much more on the market because plasma too can be separated into various ingredients. Worldwide, plasma is the basis for a $2,000,000,000-a-year industry!
Japan, according to the newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, consumes about a third of the world’s plasma. That country imports 96 percent of this blood component, most of it from the United States. Critics within Japan have called that country “the vampire of the world,” and the Japanese Health and Welfare Ministry has tried to clamp down on the trade, saying that it is unreasonable to profit from blood. In fact, the Ministry charges that medical institutions in Japan make some $200,000,000 in profits each year from just one plasma component, albumin.
The Federal Republic of Germany consumes more blood products than the rest of Europe combined, more per person than any country in the world. The book Zum Beispiel Blut (For Instance, Blood) says of blood products: “Over half is imported, mainly from the U.S.A., but also from the Third World. In any case from the poor, who want to improve their income by donating plasma.” Some of these poor people sell so much of their blood that they die from blood loss.
Many commercial plasma-centers are strategically located in low-income areas or along the borders of poorer countries. They draw the impoverished and the derelicts, who are all too willing to trade plasma for money and have ample reason to give more than they should or to conceal any illnesses they might harbor. Such plasma traffic has arisen in 25 countries around the world. As soon as it is stopped in one country, it springs up in another. Bribery of officials as well as smuggling is not uncommon.
Profit in the Nonprofit Realm
But nonprofit blood banks have also come under harsh criticism lately. In 1986 reporter Andrea Rock charged in Money magazine that a unit of blood costs the blood banks $57.50 to collect from donors, that it costs the hospitals $88.00 to buy it from the blood banks, and that it costs patients from $375 to $600 to receive it in a transfusion.
Has the situation changed since then? In September 1989 reporter Gilbert M. Gaul of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a series of newspaper articles on the U.S. blood-banking system.a After a yearlong investigation, he reported that some blood banks beg people to donate blood and then turn around and sell as much as half of that blood to other blood centers, at a considerable profit. Gaul estimated that blood banks trade about a million pints [half a million liters] of blood every year in this way, in a shadowy $50,000,000-a-year market that functions somewhat like a stock exchange.
A key difference, though: This blood exchange is not monitored by the government. No one can measure the exact extent of it, let alone regulate its prices. And many blood donors know nothing about it. “People are being fooled,” one retired blood banker told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Nobody is telling them that their blood is going to us. They would be furious if they knew about it.” A Red Cross official put it succinctly: “Blood bankers have for years fooled the American public.”
In the United States alone, blood banks collect some 13.5 million pints [6.5 million L] of blood every year, and they sell over 30 million units of blood products for about a thousand million dollars. This is a tremendous amount of money. Blood banks don’t use the term “profit.” They prefer the phrase “excesses over expenses.” The Red Cross, for instance, made $300 million in “excesses over expenses” from 1980 to 1987.
The blood banks protest that they are nonprofit organizations. They claim that unlike big corporations on Wall Street, their money does not go to stockholders. But if the Red Cross did have shareholders, it would be ranked among the most profitable corporations in the United States, such as General Motors. And blood-bank officials do have handsome salaries. Of officials in 62 blood banks surveyed by The Philadelphia Inquirer, 25 percent made over $100,000 a year. Some made more than twice that much.
Blood bankers also claim that they do not “sell” the blood they collect—they only charge processing fees. One blood banker retorts to that claim: “It drives me crazy when the Red Cross says it doesn’t sell blood. That’s like the supermarket saying they’re only charging you for the carton, not the milk.”
The Global Market
Like the plasma trade, the trade in whole blood encircles the globe. So does criticism of it. The Japanese Red Cross, for instance, stirred a furor in October 1989 when it tried to elbow its way into the Japanese market by giving large discounts on products extracted from donated blood. Hospitals reaped huge profits by claiming on their insurance forms that they had bought the blood at standard prices.
According to Thailand’s newspaper The Nation, some Asian countries have had to clamp down on the market in red gold by ending paid donations. In India as many as 500,000 sell their own blood to make a living. Some, haggard and impoverished, disguise themselves so they can donate more than is allowed. Others are deliberately overbled by the blood banks.
In his book Blood: Gift or Merchandise, Piet J. Hagen claims that the shady doings of blood banks are at their worst in Brazil. The hundreds of Brazilian commercial blood banks operate a $70 million market that draws the unscrupulous. According to the book Bluternte (Blood Harvest), the poor and unemployed stream to the countless blood banks in Bogotá, Colombia. They sell a pint [half a liter] of their blood for a meager 350 to 500 pesos. Patients may pay from 4,000 to 6,000 pesos for the same pint of blood!
Clearly, at least one global reality emerges from the foregoing: Selling blood is big business. ‘But so what? Why shouldn’t blood be a big business?’ some may ask.
Well, what makes many people uneasy about big business in general? It is greed. The greed shows, for example, when big business persuades people to purchase things they don’t really need; or worse, when it continues to foist on the public some products known to be dangerous, or when it refuses to spend money to make its products safer.
If the blood business is tainted with that kind of greed, the lives of millions of people the world over are in great danger. Has greed corrupted the blood business?
[Footnotes]
a In April 1990, Gaul’s exposé won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. It also sparked a major congressional investigation into the blood industry late in 1989.
[Box/Picture on page 6]
Placenta Traffic
Probably very few women who have just given birth wonder what happens to the placenta, the mass of tissue that nourishes the baby while it is in the womb. According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, many hospitals save it, freeze it, and sell it. In 1987 alone, the United States shipped some 1.7 million pounds [0.8 million kg] of placentas overseas. A firm near Paris, France, buys 15 tons of placentas every day! The placentas are a ready source of maternal blood plasma, which the company processes into various medicines and sells in some one hundred countries.
[Graph/Picture on page 4]
(For fully formatted text, see publication)
The Main Components of Blood
Plasma: about 55 percent of the blood. It is 92 percent water; the rest is made up of complex proteins, such as globulins, fibrinogens, and albumin
Platelets: about 0.17 percent of the blood
White Cells: about 0.1 percent
Red Cells: about 45 percent
-
-
Gift of Life or Kiss of Death?Awake!—1990 | October 22
-
-
Gift of Life or Kiss of Death?
“How many people have to die? How many deaths do you need? Give us the threshold of death that you need in order to believe that this is happening.”
DON FRANCIS, an official of the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control), pounded his fist on the table as he shouted the above words at a meeting with top representatives of the blood-banking industry. The CDC was trying to convince the blood bankers that AIDS was spreading through the nation’s blood supply.
The blood bankers were unconvinced. They called the evidence tenuous—just a handful of cases—and decided not to step up blood testing or screening. That was on January 4, 1983. Six months later, the president of the American Association of Blood Banks asserted: “There is little or no danger to the general public.”
For many experts, there was already enough evidence to warrant some action. And since then, that original “handful of cases” has ballooned alarmingly. Before 1985, perhaps 24,000 people were given transfusions tainted with HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), which causes AIDS.
Contaminated blood is an appallingly efficient way to spread the AIDS virus. According to The New England Journal of Medicine (December 14, 1989), a single unit of blood may carry enough virus to cause up to 1.75 million infections! The CDC told Awake! that by June 1990, in the United States alone, 3,506 people had already developed AIDS from blood transfusions, blood components, and tissue transplants.
But those are mere numbers. They can’t begin to convey the depth of the personal tragedies involved. Consider, for instance, the tragedy of Frances Borchelt, 71 years old. She adamantly told doctors that she did not want a blood transfusion. She was transfused anyway. She died agonizingly of AIDS as her family watched helplessly.
Or consider the tragedy of a 17-year-old girl who, suffering from heavy menstrual bleeding, was given two units of blood just to correct her anemia. When she was 19 years old and pregnant, she found out that the transfusion had given her the AIDS virus. At 22 she came down with AIDS. Besides learning that she would soon die of AIDS, she was left wondering if she had passed the disease on to her baby. The list of tragedies goes on and on, ranging from babies to the elderly, all over the world.
In 1987 the book Autologous and Directed Blood Programs lamented: “Almost as soon as the original risk groups were defined, the unthinkable occurred: the demonstration that this potentially lethal disease [AIDS] could and was being transmitted by the volunteer blood supply. This was the most bitter of all medical ironies; that the precious life-giving gift of blood could turn out to be an instrument of death.”
Even medicines derived from plasma helped to spread this plague around the world. Hemophiliacs, most of whom use a plasma-based clotting agent to treat their illness, were decimated. In the United States, between 60 and 90 percent of them got AIDS before a procedure was set up to heat-treat the medicine in order to rid it of HIV.
Still, to this day, blood is not safe from AIDS. And AIDS is not the only danger from blood transfusion. Far from it.
The Risks That Dwarf AIDS
“It is the most dangerous substance we use in medicine,” Dr. Charles Huggins says of blood. He should know; he is the director of the blood transfusion service at a Massachusetts hospital. Many think that a blood transfusion is as simple as finding someone with a matching blood type. But besides the ABO types and the Rh factor for which blood is routinely cross-matched, there may be 400 or so other differences for which it is not. As cardiovascular surgeon Denton Cooley notes: “A blood transfusion is an organ transplant. . . . I think that there are certain incompatibilities in almost all blood transfusions.”
It is not surprising that transfusing such a complex substance might, as one surgeon put it, “confuse” the body’s immune system. In fact, a blood transfusion can suppress immunity for as long as a year. To some, this is the most threatening aspect of transfusions.
Then there are infectious diseases as well. They have exotic names, such as Chagas’ disease and cytomegalovirus. Effects range from fever and chills to death. Dr. Joseph Feldschuh of the Cornell University of Medicine says that there is 1 chance in 10 of getting some sort of infection from a transfusion. It is like playing Russian roulette with a ten-chamber revolver. Recent studies have also shown that blood transfusions during cancer surgery may actually increase the risk of recurrence of the cancer.
No wonder a television news program claimed that a blood transfusion could be the biggest obstacle to recovery from surgery. Hepatitis infects hundreds of thousands and kills many more transfusion recipients than AIDS does, but it gets little of the publicity. No one knows the extent of the deaths, but economist Ross Eckert says that it may be the equivalent of a DC-10 airliner full of people crashing every month.
Risk and the Blood Banks
How have blood banks responded to the exposure of all these risks in their product? Not well, the critics charge. In 1988 the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic accused the industry of being “unnecessarily slow” in reacting to the AIDS threat. Blood banks had been urged to discourage members of high-risk groups from donating blood. They had been urged to test the blood itself, screening it for signs of coming from high-risk donors. The blood banks delayed. They pooh-poohed the risks as so much hysteria. Why?
In his book And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts charges that some blood bankers opposed further testing “almost solely on fiscal grounds. Although largely run by non-profit organizations like the Red Cross, the blood industry represented big money, with annual receipts of a billion [a thousand million] dollars. Their business of providing the blood for 3.5 million transfusions a year was threatened.”
Furthermore, since nonprofit blood banks depend so heavily on volunteer donors, they hesitated to offend any of them by excluding certain high-risk groups, homosexuals in particular. Gay-rights advocates warned darkly that forbidding them to donate blood would violate their civil rights and would smack of the concentration-camp mentality of another era.
Losing donors and adding new tests would also cost more money. In the spring of 1983, the Stanford University Blood Bank became the first to use a surrogate test on blood, which could indicate whether the blood came from donors at high risk for AIDS. Other blood bankers criticized the move as a commercial ploy to attract more patients. Tests do increase prices. But as one couple, whose baby was transfused without their knowledge, put it: “We certainly would have paid an additional $5 a pint” for such tests. Their baby died of AIDS.
The Self-Preservation Factor
Some experts say that the blood banks are sluggish to respond to dangers in blood because they do not have to answer for the consequences of their own failures. For instance, according to the report in The Philadelphia Inquirer, the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) is responsible for seeing that the blood banks are up to standard, but it relies heavily on the blood banks to set those standards. And some of the officials of the FDA are former leaders in the blood industry. Thus, inspections of blood banks actually decreased in frequency as the AIDS crisis unfolded!
U.S. blood banks have also lobbied for legislation that protects them from lawsuits. In almost every state, the law now says that blood is a service, not a product. That means that a person suing a blood bank must prove negligence on the bank’s part—a tough legal obstacle. Such laws may make blood banks safer from lawsuits, but they do not make blood safer for patients.
As economist Ross Eckert reasons, if the blood banks were held liable for the blood they traffic in, they would do more to ensure its quality. Retired blood banker Aaron Kellner agrees: “By a bit of legal alchemy, blood became a service. Everybody was home free, everybody that is, except the innocent victim, the patient.” He adds: “We could at least have pointed out the inequity, but we did not. We were concerned with our own peril; where was our concern for the patient?”
The conclusion seems inescapable. The blood-banking industry is far more interested in protecting itself financially than it is in protecting people from the hazards of its product. ‘But do all these hazards really matter,’ some might reason, ‘if blood is the only possible treatment to save a life? Don’t the benefits outweigh the risks?’ These are good questions. Just how necessary are all those transfusions?
[Blurb on page 9]
Doctors go to great lengths to protect themselves from their patients’ blood. But are patients sufficiently protected from transfused blood?
[Box/Picture on page 8, 9]
Is Blood Safe From AIDS Today?
“IT’S Bloody Good News,” proclaimed a headline in the New York Daily News on October 5, 1989. The article reported that the chances of getting AIDS from a blood transfusion are 1 in 28,000. The process for keeping the virus out of the blood supply, it said, is now 99.9 percent effective.
Similar optimism reigns in the blood-banking industry. ‘The blood supply is safer than ever,’ they claim. The president of the American Association of Blood Banks said that the risk of acquiring AIDS from blood had been “virtually eliminated.” But if blood is safe, why have both courts and doctors slapped it with such labels as “toxic” and “unavoidably unsafe”? Why do some doctors operate wearing what look like space suits, replete with face masks and wading boots, all to avoid contact with blood? Why do so many hospitals ask patients to sign a consent form relieving the hospital of liability for the harmful effects of blood transfusions? Is blood really safe from diseases such as AIDS?
The safety depends on the two measures used to protect blood: screening the donors who supply it and testing the blood itself. Recent studies have shown that in spite of all the efforts to screen out blood donors whose life-style puts them at high risk for AIDS, there are still some who slip through the screen. They give wrong answers to the questionnaire and donate blood. Some just want to find out discreetly if they are infected themselves.
In 1985 blood banks began to test blood for the presence of the antibodies that the body produces to fight the AIDS virus. The problem with the test is that a person can be infected with the AIDS virus for some time before developing any antibodies that the test would detect. This crucial gap is called the window period.
The idea that there is 1 chance in 28,000 of getting AIDS from a blood transfusion comes from a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine. That periodical set the most likely window period at an average of eight weeks. Just months before, though, in June 1989, the same journal published a study concluding that the window period can be much longer—three years or more. This earlier study suggested that such long window periods may be more common than once thought, and it speculated that, worse, some infected people may never develop antibodies for the virus! The more optimistic study, however, did not incorporate these findings, calling them “not well understood.”
No wonder Dr. Cory SerVass of the Presidential Commission on AIDS said: “Blood banks can keep telling the public that the blood supply is as safe as it can be, but the public isn’t buying that anymore because they sense it isn’t true.”
[Credit Line]
CDC, Atlanta, Ga.
[Box on page 11]
Transfused Blood and Cancer
Scientists are learning that transfused blood can suppress the immune system and that suppressed immunity may adversely affect the survival rate of those operated on for cancer. In its February 15, 1987, issue, the journal Cancer reports on an informative study done in the Netherlands. “In the patients with colon cancer,” the journal said, “a significant adverse effect of transfusion on long-term survival was seen. In this group there was a cumulative 5-year overall survival of 48% for the transfused and 74% for the nontransfused patients.”
Physicians at the University of Southern California also found that of patients who had cancer surgery many more have a recurrence of cancer if they received a transfusion. The Annals of Otology, Rhinology & Laryngology, March 1989, reported on a follow-up study of a hundred patients by these physicians: “The recurrence rate for all cancers of the larynx was 14% for those who did not receive blood and 65% for those who did. For cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, and nose or sinus, the recurrence rate was 31% without transfusions and 71% with transfusions.”
In his article “Blood Transfusions and Surgery for Cancer,” Dr. John S. Spratt concluded: “The cancer surgeon may need to become a bloodless surgeon.”—The American Journal of Surgery, September 1986.
[Pictures on page 10]
That blood is a lifesaving medicine is debatable but that it kills people is not
-
-
Transfusions—The Key to Survival?Awake!—1990 | October 22
-
-
Transfusions—The Key to Survival?
IN 1941 Dr. John S. Lundy set a standard for blood transfusions. Apparently without any clinical evidence to back him up, he said that if a patient’s hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying component of blood, goes down to a level of ten grams or less for every deciliter of blood, then the patient needs a transfusion. Thereafter that number became a standard for doctors.
This ten-gram standard has been challenged for nearly 30 years. In 1988 The Journal of the American Medical Association flatly stated that the evidence does not support the guideline. Anesthesiologist Howard L. Zauder says it is “cloaked in tradition, shrouded in obscurity, and unsubstantiated by clinical or experimental evidence.” Others simply call it a myth.
Despite all this vigorous debunking, the myth is still widely revered as a sound guideline. To many anesthesiologists and other doctors, a hemoglobin level of below ten is a trigger for transfusion to correct the anemia. It’s virtually automatic.
No doubt, that helps account for the vast overuse of blood and blood products today. Dr. Theresa L. Crenshaw, who served on the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic, estimates that in the United States alone, some two million unnecessary transfusions are administered every year and that about half of all transfusions of banked blood could be avoided. Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry decried “the indiscriminate use of transfusions” in Japan, as well as the “blind belief in their efficacy.”
The problem with trying to correct anemia with a blood transfusion is that the transfusion can be more deadly than the anemia. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who refuse blood transfusions primarily on religious grounds, have helped to prove the point.
You may have seen newspaper headlines reporting that one of Jehovah’s Witnesses died because of refusing a blood transfusion. Sadly, such reports rarely tell the whole story. Frequently, it is the doctor’s refusal to operate, or to operate soon enough, that spells death for the Witness. Some surgeons refuse to operate without freedom to transfuse if the hemoglobin level drops below ten. However, many surgeons have successfully operated on Witnesses with hemoglobin levels of five, two, and even less. Says surgeon Richard K. Spence: “What I’ve found with the Witnesses is that the lower hemoglobin does not relate to mortality at all.”
A Wealth of Alternatives
‘Blood or death.’ That is the way some doctors describe the alternatives facing a Witness patient. Yet, in reality, there are many alternatives to blood transfusion. Jehovah’s Witnesses are not interested in dying. They are interested in alternative treatments. Because the Bible forbids the ingesting of blood, they simply don’t consider blood transfusions an alternative.
In June 1988, the Report of the Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus Epidemic suggested that all patients be given just what the Witnesses have been requesting for years, namely: “Informed consent for transfusion of blood or its components should include an explanation of the risks involved . . . and information about appropriate alternatives to homologous blood transfusion therapy.”
In other words, patients should be given a choice. One such choice is a type of autologous transfusion. The patient’s own blood is salvaged during the operation and recirculated back into the patient’s veins. Where such a process is simply an extension of the patient’s own circulatory system, it is quite acceptable to most Witnesses. Surgeons also stress the value of increasing the patient’s blood volume with nonblood expanders and letting the body replenish its own red cells. Such techniques have been used in place of transfusions without increasing mortality. In fact, they can improve safety.
A promising drug called recombinant erythropoietin has recently been approved for limited use. It speeds up the body’s own production of red blood cells, in effect helping a person to make more of his own blood.
Scientists are still searching for an effective substitute for blood that imitates its remarkable oxygen-carrying capacity. In the United States, the makers of such substitutes find it hard to get approval for their products. Yet, as one such maker objected: “If you thought about bringing blood to the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] to be approved, you wouldn’t have a prayer of ever getting it tested it’s so toxic.” Still, hopes are high that an effective chemical will be found that will be approved as an oxygen-carrying substitute for blood.
So there are choices. Those mentioned here are but a few of those available. As Dr. Horace Herbsman, a professor of clinical surgery, wrote in the journal Emergency Medicine: “It’s . . . quite clear that we do have alternatives to blood replacement. Indeed, perhaps our experience with Jehovah’s Witnesses might be interpreted to mean that we do not need to rely on blood transfusions, with all their potential complications, as much as we once thought.” Of course, none of this is really new. As The American Surgeon noted: “The fact that major operations can be safely performed without blood transfusions has been amply documented in the past 25 years.”
But if blood is dangerous, and there are safe alternatives to its use, then why are millions of people transfused unnecessarily—many of them without knowing it, others actually against their will? The report of the presidential commission on AIDS notes in part the failure to educate doctors and hospitals about the alternatives. It blames another factor too: “Some regional blood centers have been hesitant to promote strategies that minimize the use of transfusion therapies, since their operating income is derived from the sale of blood and blood products.”
In other words: Selling blood is big business.
-
-
The Most Precious Fluid in the WorldAwake!—1990 | October 22
-
-
The Most Precious Fluid in the World
Even if blood transfusions could be dismissed as the dangerous and unnecessary products of a frequently greedy industry, that still would not explain why Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse them. Their reasons are altogether different and much more important. What are they?
A DROP of blood is so easy to take for granted. It wells up from a scratch or a pinprick, a tiny dome of glittering red, and we rinse it away or wipe it off without a thought.
But if we could shrink ourselves down until we were so small that this dome loomed overhead like a mountain, we would find in its crimson depths a world of incredible complexity and order. Within that single drop, there bustle great armies of cells: 250,000,000 red blood cells, 400,000 white blood cells, and 15,000,000 platelets, which are but some of the ranks. Launched into action in the bloodstream, each army sets about its separate task.
The red cells scurry through the intricate network of the vascular system, carrying oxygen from the lungs to every cell in the body and removing the carbon dioxide. So tiny are these cells that a stack of 500 of them would only be 0.04 inches [0.1 cm] high. Yet, a stack of all the red cells in your body would soar up to 31,000 miles [50,000 km]! After about 120 days of making the trip through the body 1,440 times a day, the red cell is retired. Its iron-rich core is efficiently recycled, the rest disposed of. Every second, three million red cells are removed, while the same number of new ones are made in the marrow. How does the body know that a red cell has reached the right age for retirement? Scientists are mystified. But without this system of replacing old red cells, according to one chemist, “our blood would be thick as concrete in a couple of weeks.”
Meanwhile, the white cells prowl the system, seeking out and destroying unwanted invaders. The platelets gather instantly where there is a cut and start the process of clotting and sealing off the break. All these cells are suspended in a clear, ivory-colored fluid called plasma, which is itself made up of hundreds of ingredients, many of them playing vital roles in carrying out the blood’s long list of duties.
Scientists with all their collective brainpower are at a loss to understand everything that blood does, let alone duplicate it. Could this miraculously complex fluid be anything but the work of a Master Designer? And doesn’t it stand to reason that this superhuman Creator has every right to regulate how his creations should be used?
Jehovah’s Witnesses have always thought so. They view the Bible as a letter from our Creator that contains his guidelines on how to live the best life possible; it is a book that is not silent on this matter of blood. Leviticus 17:14 says: “The soul of every sort of flesh is its blood”—not literally, of course, since the Bible also says that the living organism itself is a soul. Rather, the life of all souls is so inextricably tied up with and sustained by the blood in them that blood is appropriately viewed as a sacred fluid representing life.
For some, that is hard to understand. We live in a world that holds very little as sacred. Life itself is rarely valued as it should be. Little wonder, then, that blood is bought and sold like any other commodity. But those who respect the Creator’s wishes do not treat it that way. ‘You must not eat blood’ was God’s command to Noah and his descendants—all mankind. (Genesis 9:4) Eight centuries later He put that command in his Law to the Israelites. Fifteen centuries later he reaffirmed it once again to the Christian congregation: ‘Abstain from blood.’—Acts 15:20.
Jehovah’s Witnesses hold to that law primarily because they want to obey their Creator. By means of the sacrificial death of his own beloved Son, the Creator has already provided mankind with lifesaving blood. It can prolong life not just for a few months or years but forever.—John 3:16; Ephesians 1:7.
Furthermore, abstaining from blood transfusions has protected Witnesses from myriads of dangers. More and more people besides Jehovah’s Witnesses are refusing blood transfusions today. Slowly the medical community is responding and reducing its use of blood. As the Surgery Annual put it: “Clearly, the safest transfusion is the one not given.” The journal Pathologist noted that Jehovah’s Witnesses have long insisted that blood transfusions are not advisable treatment. It added: “There is considerable evidence to support their contention, despite protestations from blood bankers to the contrary.”
Whom would you rather trust? The wise Being who designed blood? Or the people who have made the selling of blood a big business?
-