Blood Donation Essay

The Effects of Donating Blood

“Donating blood is safe and easy, and takes less than an hour and one blood donation can help as many as three or four different people! In what other activity, can so little time do so much” ("Feel Prepared. Give Blood." ). Just think, if no one gave blood then how many people would still be living who really needed it? Despite all our medical advances, there is no good man-made substitute for human blood; this is why blood donations are so important. Some people strongly believe that donating blood is bad, but what people don’t know is that it actually has surprisingly good benefits like reducing the risk of cancer, burning calories, and even saving someone’s life, so everyone who has the opportunity to give

The biggest benefit to donating blood is saving someone’s life, “Every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood, with a total of 44,000 blood donations needed every day, reports the American Red Cross. One whole blood donation, which takes approximately 45 minutes to an hour, can come to the rescue of as many as three patients” (“Borreli, Lizette”). Most people choose to give blood because someone they know has died from of a type of cancer or any other major health problem. “There are four types of transfusable products that can be derived from a pint of whole blood: red cells, platelets, plasma and cryoprecipitate. As each pint of donated whole blood is separated into two or three of these products, each donation can help save up to three lives“ (“56 Facts About Blood and Blood Donation.”). More than one million new people are diagnosed with cancer each year, this means they will need blood. Many may need blood going through Chemotherapy and radiation, and sometimes even daily. By donating blood the person 's iron levels will stay balanced, “Healthy adults usually have about 5 grams of iron in their bodies, mostly in red blood cells but also in bone marrow. When you donate a unit of blood, you lose about a quarter of a gram of iron, which gets replenished from the food you eat in the weeks after donation, Dr. DeChristopher says. This regulation of iron levels is a good thing, because having too much iron could be bad news for your blood vessels” (Swalin, Rachel). Surprisingly enough, donating blood can help reduce the risk of cancer, “High levels of iron have been implicated in cancer. Theoretically, donating blood frequently will reduce the risk of cancers. More research is going on to find strong evidence on this one. However, the old myth that blood donations may lead to cancer has been put to the grave.” An effortless and another benefit of giving blood is that just donating blood one times burns 650