Evening star., 1952-09-19
Blood Donations
ToBeSought
Across Nation
Drive Next Month
Will Seek to Boost
Civil Defense Supply
By Jomes G. Deane

py james y. Deone
A new Nationwide drive for
blood donations will be launched
next month.
The drive will be partly to keep
blood flowing to Korea and hos
pitals here at home. But an even
more important objective will be
to build up civil defense plasma
reserve. No such reserve exists
now.
A similar drive was kicked off
a year ago for the armed forces.
1t ended in August with 1885, ,234
pints. That topped the goal, but
donors were a month late doing it..
The new drive will be bigger.
Civil Defense alone would like to
get 3.3 million pints In the next
year and, eventually. much more
than that. This drive won't end
in year. but will go on much
longer-probably two or three
years.
President Truman two days ago
called attention to the seriousness
of the blood situation. He cited
the Civil Defense need, among
others, and called supplies "dan-
gerouSly low" He urged all
Americans to donate.
Under ODM Direction.
Last years campaign was run
by the Red Cross, working with
the Defense Department. Both
agencies will continue to take
part, but the new drive win be
directed by the Office of Defense
Mobilization.
The President, some time ago,
ordered ODM to take charge of
a new, co-ordinated National
Blood Program. A committee of
doctors and defense specialists
was created. and this group now
is planning the new drive.
The Office of Civil Defense is
calculating its plasma needs to
meet an atomic attack. For plan
ming purposes. it is guessing there
might be rs million casualties
in the first attack, and that S mil
lion of them would survive. Among
the survivors, the experts calcu-
late the average need for plasma
or a plasma substitute would be
Ia units per casualty.
Minimum Needs.
Needed, then, to treat 5 mil
lion survivors would be 3.75 mil
lion units of plasma, and an
equal amount of expander, a
chemical substitute. It takes "a
pints of whole blood to produce
one unit of dried plasma. That
means a plasma need Of 8 mil
lion pints.
Civil Defense spokesmen say
this is a minimum. DEVELOPMENT
OF more ferocious weapons, such
as the hydrogen bomb, would
mean revising the goal upward.
And even all this plasma would
just meet the first emergency
need. Donors of whole blood
would be sought as soon as pos
sible after an attack. The plasma
merely would fill the gap and keep
millions alive.
AS a result of the earlier cam
paign. the Defense Department
now has a more modest plasma
stockpile. A spokesman said it
amounts to about IL million
units. The wounded in Korea
have been supplied with some of
the blood collected. plus a reserve
OF about $4,000 units left from
World War II. The World War
II stock had to be reprocessed
before it could be used.
Reprocessed in Five Years.
Plasma keeps about five years
without reprocessing. Reproc-
esSed, it can be kept another five.
In last years drive, the weekly
donor quota was $4,000 pints. The
Red Cross collected about three
fourths Of the total. the armed
forces themselves the rest. In a
few Of the weeks, donors topped
the quota. but in most they
didn't.
Korea always has been taken
care OF first, chiefly with whole
blood flown across the Pacific.
Korean requirements always have
been met, according to Spokesmen