Plenty of good and selfless reasons to donate blood or platelets. Here is a selfish one, besides the record breaking weight loss of 1/2kg in 10mins.
Plenty of good and selfless reasons to donate blood or platelets. Here is a selfish one, besides the record breaking weight loss of 1/2kg in 10mins.
This is what bothers me somewhat about when I donate blood. I’m part of the Heroes for Babies program Red Cross has, so mine often ends up in children’s hospitals. It just doesn’t sit well with me that I could be contaminating a life so young with microplastics and PFAS. I’ve tried to cut as many plastics out of my life as I can to reduce what goes into my body, but its so hard to dump everything.
I will not stop donating since the alternative outcome would likely be worse, and I will keep trying to chop out more plastic (most notoriously food packaging) from my life. I just wish I knew if they filtered these things out or not for sure. It’s been nagging at me for several years now.
I guess that’s the best you can do. A quick online search showed some breakthroughs in microplastic filtration in recent years, but if it’s all that new then it is unlikely to be used in blood donations. I’d say worth asking at the clinic to at least make it a topic of conversation, the more people ask about it the more urgent it will become.
Getting rid of plastic has been a five year process for me now, bit by bit anything that needed replacement was bought in stainless steel, glass or cotton. Professional kitchen supply stores are a great spot for very cheap (2-5€) utensils in stainless with little bells and whistles to break. For PFAS getting rid of non-stick pans is key. Cast iron is okay, but I love stainless, it’s very non-stick if you just preheat it for a very long time