ESF is organizing a blood drive on Wednesday August 14at the Blaise Pascal Music and Community Center. No product can replace blood donation: the latter remains vital.
+ Blood products: what are the needs?
Today, there is no treatment or synthetic medicine capable of replacing human blood and labile blood products (LBP) from blood donations. This voluntary and benevolent act is therefore irreplaceable.
In France, the needs to treat the sick require 10,000 blood donations per day, including 1,700 in the Ile de France region. And this figure is tending to increase… Indeed, until 2013, under the combined effect of increased life expectancy and medical progress, the consumption of blood products recorded a growth of 1 to 3% per year. The need for red blood cells thus increased by 29% between 2002 and 2012.
Blood donations must be regular and constant because the shelf life of blood products is limited (7 days for platelets, 42 days for red blood cells).
++ Blood requirements
Emergency situations and chronic needs
Blood donation helps treat more than a million patients each year in France. Irreplaceable and vital, blood products are used in two main cases: emergency situations (hemorrhages during childbirth, accidents, surgical operations, etc.) and chronic needs (blood diseases and cancers).
Blood products are also used to manufacture medicines (immunoglobulins, clotting factors, etc.). Today, more than 200 diseases are treated with substances produced from plasma. And patients benefiting from these treatments alone represent half of the patients treated in France thanks to blood donations.
++ Use of blood products
According to a national survey* on recipients of blood products, conducted by the EFS, blood diseases and cancers remain the pathologies that consume the most blood products: they concern almost half (47%) of transfused patients.
Surgical interventions account for just over a third (35%) of transfused patients. This study also revealed that 80% of the transfused products are red blood cells, that 52% of transfusions are scheduled and that the average age of recipients is 65 years.
