Maybe the Silicon Valley ‘blood boy’ can be brought to market.
Looks like they're still around but have pivoted to boring wearables and of course AI.
A supposed win for the FDA, but perhaps a loss to humanity since there does seem to be evidence that the idea actually worked.
Is my understanding correct? I hope blood transfusion hasn't become a routine procedure these days.
I had an open heart surgery and didn't get a blood transfusion.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-peanut-aller...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4562830/
It looks like the allergy isn't permanent though.
(Seems wikipedia removed this factoid now... and other sources state "most" snake venom)
I assume they tested on animals, not humans.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5315628/
I cannot find anything now talking about a blood transfusion (I probably read about it 10 years back). It more or less jives with the scholarly article in that "immunogenic effects are reported".
A slightly less dry read:
https://www.grunge.com/1105496/how-an-opossum-could-be-the-r...
I'll see myself out.
You got that right! My wife used to eat a banana every day. Then something in her flipped and she reacts as if she is allergic to bananas and the rest of the world - not exaggerating. She can eat a very small number of foods and has to avoid most people because of smells. It isn't allergies it is - you guessed it - her immune system.
If we could just flip it back to "normal"...
Little did I know, having postviral sequelae causes my immune system to start hating many things I used to eat. A food blood sensitive test showed that bananas, beef, coffee were what set my immune system off the most.
I was told it was gut permeability causing food particles to leak into the blood stream causing the immune response. So the fix has been to stop eating those, let the gut heal, and over time I've been able to eat those foods in moderation years later.
They focus on infections and cancers I think.
Why would they ask for allergies if we don't yet know that they can be transmitted like this?
I see no reason to eat those franken-foods just because you're a vegan, a lot of them have strange additives to make them taste and look like animal stuff, it is simply not worth the risk to eat them IMHO.
Of course, this is a personal view point.
"Just Egg" is mung bean and canola oil. You can DIY it for cheaper, it's like buying pancake mix. There's always a few strange additives for these sorts of products (improve shelf life, anti-caking, emulsion, whatever), but that's not a vegan-specific thing.
"The development of a new food allergy, such as an allergy to eggs, as a direct result of a blood transfusion is extremely rare and not a well-documented phenomenon. Food allergies are typically triggered by exposure to specific allergenic proteins found in foods, and blood transfusions do not typically involve the introduction of food proteins."
Given this, a comment which does nothing but quote chatGPT 3.5 verbatim can do more harm than not commenting at all, especially on health matters, where such qualities can constitute outright recklessness.
If you want to share your own thoughts, though, I know I'd welcome them. At least humans have a greater than 0% chance of caring about the well-being of humans.
It would be a disaster if this type of surgery also transmitted some prior/protein misfolding disease decades later. Millions would be impacted. The practice stared in the 1980s, but really only became popular in the early 2000s with the boom in arthroscopic surgery standardization.
Hopefully the blood-brain barrier prevents this.
This is excellent material for the conspiracy theorists.
But this always had to be weighed against the risks of not getting the transfusion. Typically the consequences of not getting a transfusion when it is medically indicated is pretty severe.
We don't really need to worry about unlikely not-yet-understood edge cases that happen years later from procedures we've done millions of times. We gotta gotta about blood loss.
Please remember to ask your doctor about autologous transfusion, where you bank your own blood before a planned procedure.
Before we understood the risks we used to do transfusions a lot more frequently than we do now and this led to a generation of anaesthetists who would basically treat with blood transfusion at the slightest sign of low blood count. More recent studies have suggested that a lower blood count can be tolerated than was previously realised and that you can often get away with guaranteed pathogen free (and much cheaper) volume expanders. There has also been developments in cell salvage to reinfuse suctioned blood and methods to avoid blood loss in the first place.
Medical practice has also changed to reflect this and the changed evidence base, especially given the relative costs (hospital managers love to save money). Hip and knee replacement surgery used to use blood routinely and were almost always done under general anaesthetic, but given we now want to get patients out within a day or two post surgery we do the surgery under spinal block and minimise blood loss as much as we can.
tldr; We still need transfusions for some things but we should be using them less than we do.
Back in the early 1990s my wife worked in epidemiology studies at the national blood agency in our country. There was a lot of work to be done since at the time being a hemophiliac and receiving blood products meant a good chance of dying from AIDS or non-A non-B hepatitis (now known as Hep C). The agency did not test each and every donation for the presence of these pathogens because the available inexpensive tests had a poor success rate (high false positive) and the better tests were prohibitively expensive and the policy was "if we destroyed any suspected donations we'd have to destroy all of them". The idea of a screening questionnaire was floated but because most sexually transmissible diseases are also transmissible through blood, the question "Have you ever had sex?" would eliminate quite a few donations. They were a tough time for the blood agency.
Thankfully technology has progressed and testing for known pathogens in a blood sample is rapid and inexpensive. Testing for unknown pathogens is still a challenge.
It's also a crushingly depressing book.
Donors who lived in Britain in the 90's are still banned due to the Lack of a Test which can identify 'Mad Cow Disease'.
Of course. What matters though isn't the absolute risk, it's whether such treatments provide enough benefits to outweigh those risks. Not dying outweighs pretty much everything.