Epsilon Chapter in the News
September 18, 2001

http://www.dailytargum.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=96084

State's blood supply narrowly avoids shortage
By Spencer Ackerman, Senior Writer
Media Credit: Spencer Ackerman/Staff Photographer

A donor collection assistant from the central Jersey chapter of the American Red Cross extracts blood from the arm of Douglass College senior Andrea Hadley yesterday in the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus.

Around the state, disquieted citizens continued to roll up their sleeves and donate blood for the victims of last week's terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, despite diminishing prospects for rescuers to pull survivors from the six stories of debris in lower Manhattan. And although the state's blood banks are imploring potential donors to give blood in the coming weeks, their officials — often breathing a sigh of relief — speak of the severe blood shortage the state faced the morning of the terrorist attacks.

Speculations differ as to exactly how many days worth of blood the state's blood network possessed at the time of the assault, but interviews with several different blood bank officials suggest that less than a week's supply existed by the time American Airlines Flight 11 rammed into Tower One. "It would probably last about five days and that would be it," said Rita Polchin, marketing manager at New Jersey Blood Services on New Street in New Brunswick. As soon as Polchin heard about the metropolitan catastrophe, she placed frantic telephone calls to local radio stations beseeching anchors to inform listeners of the urgent need for blood. "We were in emergency mode," she said. "We knew a five-day supply would not take care of multiple injuries."

To offer perspective to the supply issue, Polchin said treatment for a serious highway bus accident can deplete a two-day amount of blood from the state's network.

In a prepared statement issued on Sept. 10, a spokeswoman from the Blood Center of New Jersey described the "blood shortages" the state faced as "unprecedented." Typically, blood banks face their greatest shortages at the beginning of autumn, since they cannot rely over the summer on the high school donations that compose a significant fraction of total annual supply. But the response of ordinary citizens to roll up their sleeves after the terror replenished the supply far beyond demand. Judy Daniels, author of the statement — which, given the deluge of blood from donors statewide, is a relic of a saner era only a week past — said yesterday that the Center is now only in serious search of the universally receivable O Negative blood type, but the need for O Negative blood does not rise to the level of a shortage.

Daniels was ambivalent about how deep the state's blood supply would have been if no one had shown up to donate last week. "That's a tough question," she said. "Hypothetically, if not enough people had responded, there would have been a crisis. But our country wouldn't have let that happen."

Overestimated expectations of demand contributed to preventing the "unprecedented blood shortages" from overwhelming state supply. Last Tuesday, as word of the disaster was just beginning to spread and preliminary estimates circulated, the state instructed its blood centers to prepare for 4,000 possible victims of the New York nightmare to be taken to state hospitals — predictions which turned out to be woefully exaggerated. "A lot of blood was not needed, because, unfortunately, there were not a lot of survivors," Daniels said.

On campus yesterday for a blood drive sponsored by the University's Lambda Sigma Upsilon fraternity and Lambda Theta Alpha sorority, representatives from the central New Jersey chapter of the American Red Cross described the late-summer blood shortages as "severe." But both Middlesex County Account Manager Christie Schwaikert and Blood Coordinator Michelle Stoudt echoed Daniels' statement that the exact depths of the potential shortage for New York attack victims could not be reliably estimated due to the myriad factors upon which blood supply is contingent, including storage and transportation.

Over the last few days, the Blood Center of New Jersey collected close to 3,000 pints of blood, and now deploys the adjective "unprecedented" to describe the public's response to the donation call. Polchin said New Jersey Blood Services collected 4,000 pints during the same time period. And while the representatives from the American Red Cross on hand in the Multipurpose Room of the Rutgers Student Center on the College Avenue campus did not say how many pints they have collected since the attack, they potentially exceeded their collection goal of 55 pints yesterday. Schwaikert said over 150 members of the University community donated blood at the student center, but since testing must still go on to determine how much of the harvested blood is suitable for transfusions, a precise figure could not be offered yesterday.

And statewide, citizens are not shrugging off the call to donate in the coming weeks, according to representatives from the three blood banks. Polchin said she had gathered over 3,000 names and telephone numbers of potential donors, accumulated in a pile "probably about six inches high" on her desk in her New Street offices. Stoudt said the American Red Cross would return to campus on Nov. 28 to take more collections, as donors must wait 56 days in between donation sessions. But she said students had been dropping off their names for the American Red Cross to call them as necessary. "I haven't heard one [negative] comment" among students eager to donate, she said. "It's really been great."