Global Blood Resources' On-Line Calculator Reveals Wasted Blood Costs by Blood Salvage Machines During Heart Surgery to be in th...( The Hemobag(R) prevents wastage by ...)

The Hemobag(R) prevents wastage by saving the patient's own whole blood

SOMERS, Conn., May 6 /PRNewswire/ -- A recent paper in a journal for perfusionists, the health professionals who manage patients on heart and lung bypass machines during open heart surgery, reports how Global Blood Resources' online waste calculator can be used to estimate the cost of blood wastage seen with the "cell washing" machines most commonly used during heart surgery to salvage the patient's own blood for autotransfusion. Such wastage usually requires transfusion of increasingly costly blood components donated by others (allogeneic blood), the very type of riskier transfusion that blood salvage machines were designed to prevent. The GBR calculator exposes how this previously unknown wastage can cost billions of dollars each year, money that could be saved by using Global Blood Resources' salvage device, the Hemobag(R).

Although the tainted blood scandals of the 1980s and 1990s are largely over thanks to improved blood donor screening tests for diseases such as AIDS and hepatitis C, discouraging news still abounds. News reports commonly feature severe blood shortages and research that documents newly recognized transfusion risks such as how older stored blood may put heart surgery patients at increased risk. In response, the medical community has moved to manage blood usage by minimizing transfusion of donated blood and instead saving and transfusing the patient's own blood that would otherwise be lost during surgery and is by far the best choice. Cardiovascular heart disease is still the leading cause of death in America. To help correct this each day approximately a thousand people in the U.S. alone have heart surgery, with over 325,000 cases annually and growing 5% each year. Blood salvage has been used extensively in cardiac surgery, which historically has been a major user of the nation's blood supply, consuming between 15-20% of the blood transfused in the United
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