On behalf of the NZBS we would like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and hope you all have a fantastic break over the holiday period.
Over the last 12 months it has been our absolute pleasure welcoming our donors, both regular and new, to our Takapuna Donor Centre and North Shore Mobile drives, and we thank you for your blood/plasma donations. Also, please understand, we appreciate and acknowledge the lives you have saved and the time you have committed to donate.
For those of you who are travelling away for your holiday, please travel safely and enjoy your break. For those of you not going away, we understand, why go anywhere when the North Shore is Auckland’s holiday resort?
We will be remiss if we did not advise you of the blood and plasma drives over the December/January months, so please view our schedule.
Remember the need for blood and plasma does not take a holiday. In fact demand can increase, so if you are available please visit a mobile, or come in and see us in Takapuna.
If you are holidaying outside of Auckland, please feel free to visit nzblood.co.nz to find a donor centre near to where you are staying. We would appreciate you even more.
Stay safe, travel safe and see you all soon.
More plasma donors needed
The US is currently topping up New Zealand's supplies of a vital blood product, but if we had more plasma donors we could be self-sufficient.
Demand for life-saving plasma is growing at such a rate that New Zealand is falling further and further behind on its supplies, forcing it to pay millions of dollars every year for immunoglobulin from America, one of the few countries that pays people to donate.
Plasma is the yellow liquid component of blood that is needed to help the body recover from injury, distribute nutrients, remove waste and prevent infection. It is used to treat up to 50 illnesses, including cancer and autoimmune diseases. Immunoglobulin is a key protein in plasma.
New Zealand hospitals rely on donors - around 17,500 of them - who give plasma on a regular basis through the national blood service, Te Ratonga Toto O Aotearoa. It amounts to several tonnes a year, but it is well short of what's needed.
NZ Blood's transfusion medicine specialist, Dr Richard Charlewood says New Zealand is at a tipping point.
"Unless we can get our plasma donation numbers up we're going to get further and further behind. That's not good for us in a financial sense, in that we have to buy plasma from other countries, it's not good for us from a self-sufficiency perspective.
"When Covid hit and donation numbers went down in the United States they made it very clear to the world that it is a United States-first policy," he says.
That means the US will not run out of intravenous immunoglobulin for itself - it will simply stop providing to other countries.
"As a small country with a small value contract we would probably be dropped fairly quickly," Dr Charlewood says.
It is called liquid gold because immunoglobulin is more valuable than gold. The global market for plasma is estimated to be worth more than $50 billion, rising to $75 billion by 2027. The US profits most from the global market because it is responsible for 70 percent of all the plasma on the world blood market.
Peter Jaworski of Georgetown University in the US has gathered the data on the few countries that are self-sufficient on plasma and those that aren't, like New Zealand and Australia.
Jaworski, an associate teaching professor of Strategy, Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business, estimates New Zealand now pays $10 million a year to import plasma.
New Zealand was 100 percent self-sufficient until 2012, but until 2016 the amount of imported immunoglobulin was insignificant.
"In 2015, New Zealand was probably the only country in the world that was self-sufficient in plasma for immunoglobulin without help from the commercial sector, and without compensating donors," Jaworski says.
Excerpt from RNZ “Call to arms for plasma”.
