radiation, it can be equally assumed that irradiated blood cells could be hazardous to health, especially if
they are given to babies and pregnant mothers.
What makes blood transfusion so risky is that there has never been a randomized, double-blind control
study to demonstrate its effectiveness and safety. No scientific proof at all is available to justify its use.
Like an antibiotic drug, blood transfusion may have its place as a last resort measure to save a person’s
life. As a standard practice, however, it not only fails to achieve the desired results, it may be doing more
harm than good.
A number of studies confirmed that receiving a transfusion during an operation increases the risk of
infection fourfold. Considering the high sterility of the objects and environment in operation rooms,
having a blood transfusion practically takes a patient back to surgical conditions that existed over two
hundred years ago, when precautions against infection didn’t exist. The risk of blood infection has
practically remained the same and, with the increase in antibiotic resistant organisms, actually worsened.
Genetic blood research has proven that blood, like our fingerprints, is uniquely individual, implying
that it cannot be transferred to another person without risking complications. Each person’s blood
contains a multiplicity of antibodies, antigens, and infectious agents, most of which science has yet to
identify. This makes transfusions even more risky because the majority of infectious agents contained in
blood have not even been identified and can therefore not be targeted with drugs. But even if a blood-
borne infection is diagnosed, it is a little too late. In the United States alone there are 230,000 new cases
of hepatitis a year that are purely the result of blood transfusions. Just as in the case of the AIDS test, the
screening of blood for the hepatitis C virus has turned out to be an equally futile undertaking. Most of the
newly developed tests, including Riba-2 and Murex ELISA, proved wrong three-quarters of the time.
Furthermore, a blood transfusion increases a patient’s risk of acquiring human T-cell leukemia tenfold
when compared with contracting HIV through blood. It may also trigger unforeseeable, life-threatening
allergic reactions. In patients undergoing major abdominal surgery, blood transfusion is the dominant
contributing factor to organ system failure. It is more and more obvious that neither a blood transfusion
nor “pure” foreign blood is safe.
The Alternatives
Clear evidence has shown that a person’s red blood cell count is not as important as his total
circulating volume of fluid. With a high volume, your body can speed up the flow of even a low red blood
cell count. It is much more problematic if a patient loses a large amount of fluid from the circulatory
system, which would coerce the heart into making an enormous effort to send those red blood cells around
to all the vital organs. All of the alternative techniques to blood transfusion are based on first stopping the
bleeding and second replacing the lost amount of circulating fluids. This can be achieved in a number of
ways.
Auto transfusion is a very safe method of supplying patients with their own blood (donated before
surgery) after they undergo major surgery, such as coronary bypasses, congenital heart surgery, or
surgical removal of cancer.
Hemodilution is a technique that maintains the amount of fluid circulating around the body through
artificial volume expanders, either colloids (starches or gelatin) or crystalloids (sugar or saline solutions).
A major study of over 10,000 surgery patients showed that adults can undergo the rapid loss of 1,000 to
2,000 ml blood (about a third of their total volume) and not go into irreversible shock if adequate