Ask Congress to Support Funding to Diversify America’s Blood Donor Base

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This week is Blood Advocacy Week, a collaborative initiative of America’s Blood Centers that is bringing together members of the blood community, advocates, providers, patients, and more to advance policies that promote the value of blood to patients, communities, and our healthcare system. One of the most pressing issues facing the blood supply is the urgent need to diversify the donor base to better ensure that blood is available for all patients who rely on it.

Donor diversity is critical to patient care. A wide variety of conditions that disproportionately impact minority populations require ongoing blood transfusions as part of a patient’s care management, and these patients require blood that is closely matched beyond just blood type. This type of closely matched blood is most likely to come from someone of a similar racial and ethnic background.

For example, Sickle Cell patients – who are disproportionately from communities of color - often rely on frequent blood transfusions that are not only matched to their blood type, but are also antigen matched to avoid transfusion reactions while treating the impacts of this disease and mitigating complications. This antigen matched blood is substantially more likely to come from a donor with a similar racial and ethnic background. Since these conditions disproportionately impact minority populations, there is an urgent need to diversify the donor base to ensure blood is available to meet each individual patient’s need.

We need a blood supply that’s as diverse as the nation that depends on it. To achieve this, I am asking you to introduce legislation to develop and implement a new pilot program that would provide grant funding directly to blood centers nationwide to help them attract more diverse and younger blood donors, and increase the testing to find the antigen matched blood necessary to meet every patient’s need.

Thank you for your focus on this matter and for making strengthening America’s blood supply a national priority. I look forward to your prompt reply.

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