Saturday, May 25, 2013

Blood Drive (Oct 2011)

This Friday is the annual Blood Drive. This is done by Nurse Bailey, who has been doing the blood drive for twenty-five years. Nurse Bailey runs the Health Club, and the Health Club conducts the blood drive.
There are usually around two hundred students who participate in donating blood. To donate blood, there are some requirements. Students who are sixteen years old are allowed to donate with parental consent. When students are seventeen or older, they can donate without parental consent. There are also weight requirements for donating. The student cannot be less than one hundred and one pounds. Larger, more athletic students are able to give doubles; that counts for two units. After students give blood, they cannot give blood again for fifty-six days.
Last year, the blood drive collected over two hundred and fifty units of blood.

Nurse Bailey is hoping that the students will learn what a valuable thing donating blood can do and that the students who do donate will continue to donate during their adult life.


Giving one unit of blood can save three lives. Every two seconds a person in the United States needs blood. More than thirty-eight million blood donations are needed it. Sixteen million blood donations are collected each year. Only nine point five people donate blood in a year. The main two reasons people do not donate are because they have never thought about it, or they do not like needles. If a person started donating blood at the age of seventeen and donated every fifty-six days until the person reached seventy-six, they would have donated forty-eight gallons of blood, and potentially helped save more than one thousand lives.

No comments:

Post a Comment