Today, June 14th, is World Blood Donor Day. The main purpose of the day of action is to raise awareness of the urgency of blood donations and to highlight the contribution that voluntary, unpaid blood donors make to the health systems. Every year, the WorldHealth Organization (WHO) has a motto for World Blood Donor Day, which this year is: Blood donation is an act of solidarity. Join us and save lives.
The moral aspect and the will to do something for the community often play the main role in the motivation for donating blood. This is confirmed in one Survey by digital insurance manager CLARK in collaboration with YouGov. Accordingly, 48 percent of those surveyed said they wanted to help the general public. 28 percent wanted to support organizations like the DKMS. Financial incentives only play a role for 18 percent.
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Corona pandemic has an impact on the willingness to donate blood
However the sublime drive doesn’t seem to be as widespread as a look at Infographic by Statista and MIT Technology Review shows. The number of blood donors has been declining since 2017. At least the numbers from 2020 are according to one Study by the University of Hamburg influenced by the corona pandemic. “Our results show that active donors at the beginning of the pandemic were certainly more aware that they could donate. However, as the pandemic progressed, they felt much less able to do so,” explains study leader Prof. Dr. Michel Clement, Professor of Marketing & Media at the University of Hamburg. Active donors are people, i.e. those who have donated blood at least once in the past 24 months. Inactive donors are those who have donated before. For them, this awareness was significantly lower during the first year of the pandemic and their willingness also fell more sharply.
While the hurdle to donating blood is comparatively low, the step to donating an organ is larger. When asked about the preferred regulation for organ donation, 49 percent of the participants in a survey by Statista and YouGov are in favor of the currently applicable decision-making solution. Almost three out of ten people are in favor of the contradiction solution. Regardless of which solution is preferred, the current organ donation situation is similar to blood donation: there are not enough donor organs. In addition to conventional bridging therapies, one possibility would be to help patients on the waiting list, for example xenotransplantation. However, research still has a long way to go before animal organs can actually be used as replacement organs.
