Donate Blood
All about Blood
CPR
Give Life, it's in your Blood
Do something amazing: give Blood !
Blood is essential for transporting oxygen, nutrients, and other substances to tissues throughout the body.
Blood is required in hospitals and emergency rooms for patients with cancer and other diseases, for organ transplant recipients, and to help save the lives of accident victims. Burn victims, premature infants, and people with blood disorders and anemia are also in need of blood.
Despite advances in modern medicine, there is no sustitute for human blood. Healthy donors are the only source. For the thousands of people who receive blood in Lebanon each year, your donation can literally mean the difference life and death.
Step 1
Before going for blood donation, please remember to have a good meal. When you get there, the hospital/organization involved would ask you to fill in a form in regards to your age, health status, family history, diseases etc, to prevent the transmission of infectious diseases amongst the patients.
Step 2
Next, a brief physical exam would be given whereby the doctors would test for blood pressure, pulse, temperature. After this a tiny drop of blood will be taken from your fingertip. This allows us to check your haemoglobin levels - to ensure that giving blood won't make you anaemic.
Step 3
It's time to take your blood: you will be asked to be seated in a reclining chair and place yourself in a position that you find most comfortable in. A needle would be injected into your vein (There's nothing to worry about, most people hardly feel a thing) and a unit of blood would be drawn from you and stored immediately to prevent contamination. Normally about 470ml is taken, which is quickly replaced by your body.
Step 4
Once you've given blood, donors are usually served refreshments to replenish their loss blood while remaining seated. The whole donation process shouldn't take more than an hour.
All about Blood
from A to O...
The ABO System
If you have blood group A then you've got A antigens covering your red cells. Blood group B means you have B antigens, while group O has neither, and group AB has some of both.
The ABO system also contains lots of little antibodies in the plasma, antibodies being the body's natural defence against foreign antigens: so blood group A has anti-B in their plasma, blood group B has anti-A (you probably get the picture at this stage).
To complicate matters though, group AB has none and group O has both of the antibodies.
Which means giving someone blood from the wrong ABO group could be fatal.
The anti-A antibodies in group B attack group A cells and vice versa.
Which is why group A blood must never be given to a group B person.
Group O negative is a different story.
The table on the right indicates what blood types can a specific type donate to.
The Rh system
Well, it gets more complicated here on in, because there's another antigen to be considered - the Rh antigen. Some of us have it, some of us don't: if it is present, the blood is RhD positive, if not it's RhD negative.
So, for example, some people in group A will have it, and will therefore be classed as A+ (or A positive). While the ones that don't, are A- (or, wait for it...A negative). And so it goes for groups B, AB and O.
This effectively doubles the number of different blood types to be matched, because you shouldn't mix blood type A+ with blood type A-.
84% of the population is Rh positive, the other 16% of the population is running around with Rh negative blood.
Note that RH positive blood types can donate to Rh positive types only, whereas Rh negative can donate to both Rh+ and Rh-.
CardioPulmonary Resuscitation - CPR
2 full breaths, 15 pushes
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