It's still early days, but this technology is a hopeful step.
  • bloup@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    15·
    1 day ago

    Describing donating a pint of blood every several weeks as “regular bloodletting” is really something. I mean I guess in a literal sense that is what is happening, but they literally will not take your blood if it is not safe to do so, including donating too recently.

    Edit: by the way, after thinking about this for only a few moments longer, i have realized you can probably do even better just by donating plasma only, and now you are not even losing your blood cells.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      1 day ago

      I know pfas levels are immediately lower after the donation. I’m not under the impression that pfas levels stay low for very long i.e. long enough to safely donate blood again.

      Plasma donations can be done more frequently, though, so that might be actually effective way to reduce contamination.

      But, it’s kind of messed up that we’re donating contaminated blood and/or plasma. Is that good for the people that use our blood? Who knows!

      • bloup@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        12·
        1 day ago

        I think it’s definitely worth doing some serious math first before publicly writing it off. Even if its a marginal benefit, as long as its just a tiny bit greater than the marginal benefit you get from intentionally avoiding exposures as much as reasonably possible, then over time the PFAS levels will come down slowly but steadily

        Secondly, no its not okay to give people contaminated blood. But the blood is contaminated with something basically everyone is contaminated with already, and the person who needs transfusion will likely die without it, so it is kind of moot.

        But after only a few more moments of thought, if we were really concerned about it, we could just perform the dialysis on all the donated blood and plasma after it has been taken where we have economies of scale and nobody needs to be hooked up to a machine for it