the do not allow this year. i was disappointed either rituals, like people, shaving their heads as an act of sacrifice, or symbolically purifying themselves by taking a bath in the river. have been allowed to go ahead. while type them this year may be less festive people celebrating it, say it doesn't make the day any less meaningful to them. florence li, al jazeera or the port on what's going on there with me. so robin in doha, reminder of our top stories, a thick layer of ash on the runway of tongue was main apples is delaying. international deliveries of aid is expected to take days to clear after saturdays volcanic eruption and sin army 3 deaths have not been confirmed. the ashes proving quite problematic, not just for water and sanitation because tom collected water from the roofs of

households. but in terms of access for the aid from a straight to a new zealand and other flights, they need to clear the runway. latest information i have is that 60 percent of the runway has been cleared. and this is done manually. i hear up to 200 volunteers sweeping the runway in preparation for the supplies to land on thursday or friday. if things happen according to plan germany, foreign minister has met her russian counterpart in moscow to emphasize the need to diffuse tension with ukraine. that meeting comes 24 hours after her talks with the cranium. leaders in care of the kremlin says it has no intention of invading ukraine, but phase of confrontation have increased since the russian troops must near the border. the u. k. prime minister boys johnson has denied that he had lied to parliament about a lockdown party. johnson's former adviser accused him of mislead, again, peas about the event. that is,

nobody told me that what we were doing was as you say, against the rules that the event in question was something that we were going to do something that wasn't her a work event. and you know, as i said in the house of commons, when i went out into that garden, i thought that i was attending a work event. i think it's very important that we see what su gracie, what the inquiry has to say. the trial as adjourned, and nigeria of a separate his leader accused of treason. none. the con is the leader of a group called the indigenous people of, biafra, the campaigns for secession of the southeastern region of biafra. it's separated from nigeria in 1967, which led to the nigerian civil war. those were the headlines to re, we'll be here with the news i just and a half hours time to stay with us. the stream is next. it's one year since joe biden was sworn in as president of the united states against

a backdrop of rioting on capitol hill from navigating the plan demick to the withdrawal from afghanistan. we'll look back at his policy, wins and losses, and examined the challenges that remain special coverage on al jazeera. hi, i'm sorry. okay, and you're watching the stream. the organization in the united states that supplies 40 percent of the native blood is facing a severe shortage. this is putting doctors in difficult situation with having to make choices about patient care. this is what i'm really ultimate told us area. the american red cross declared its 1st ever national blood crisis. we are at the lowest inventory that we have seen in over to 10 years. we have sustained

shortages throughout the pandemic. and this volume back and forth has caused a lot of issues with being able to get our inventory to hospitals and patients in need. the last 2 years have been very difficult on the american blood supply during the shower to day to talk about the blood shortage at the red cross, the impact and what can be done about a trio of doctors so much studying right here, right in front of you hello daughter, so lovely to have you david and kita. evan, welcome to the string, david, please introduce yourself to our global audience. i my name is david o, i am the chief medical officer at hawks work blood center, which is a part of the university of cincinnati. so i am in charge of helping to collect enough blood for patients. ah, get to have your expertise on this discussion and kito, welcome please introduce yourself to the stream viewers. hi, i'm dr. agatha saga. i'm a primary care physician and a patient with bait at dallas. see me on major,

requiring blood transfusions every month. right, so lovely to have you looking forward to hearing more about that and evan walk him to the stream. what is i international? he asked me to know about you me and i'm dr. busy every time. busy i am a critical care physician and emergency. busy medicine physician at indiana university, get to having it. all right. you've had the expertise if you want to know about donating blood and the u. s. shortage from the red cross. this is what you need to do if you on youtube comment sections right here. ask questions, put comments in there. i'll try and put them into today's show. i'm evan festival, one guess. let's try to work out how serious is this shortage by the american red cross. what are we talking about? are they about to run out to morrow? next week? what's the situation please tell me out for us? i think in total overall we're facing a significant shortage of the day. it's not going to run out today tomorrow, but as we move into the future,

it's going to be harder and harder to secure blood united states. and plot allocation is done based on how much you use for your hospital system. and so we're going to get a lot in the small community hospital, small town hospitals across america that maybe only have one or 2 units of blood that are allocated to them. and if you have one trauma patient who came in there, what i see in the emergency department, it's not uncommon to go to 10 units while killing for them. and so immediately your whole blood storage is depleted at your hospital and you have to start talking to other area to get that what? and i think that's what we're going to see a lot more of in the coming future payments. obviously, everyone's thinking why, what's going on? my 1st thought was it's got to do some steve coding cuz people aren't going to be comfortable giving blood. and we've been told that we should stay away social distance. how can you do that and get blood at the same time? is that, is that the key to the machine, david? so certainly a portion of this is related to coded. and one of the big issues really, for us,

is not really donors coming out because blood donors and the united states haven't really responded when asked to face of truck tragedies. and i would include called the 1900 as well that these events we really facing, shortages in, in our staffing and the people who can actually collect the blood. so many, many bugs have cancelled. not only because of issues with donors and organizations base with covered, but because we actually don't have the staff to be able to collect what i would like to make a statement. kind of based on the 40 percent of blood collected markets to red cross. many people are not aware that that is 40 percent white, but the rest is collected by other organizations. so my organization, hasse report center as part of the proceed cincinnati. we're an independent regional center and our so i actually is very healthy right now. we are asked by 30 hospitals in 1900 county area and those hospitals actually have very good supplies

. we do share one hospital with national provider where they provide most of the blood because of g graphic issues where like to have 3 hours away from them. and they had told me that they now are just receiving one unit of a day. and they usually like to keep us quite about 25 to 30 in their inventory. so they are now being forced to allocate a tree osh, the patients that they have with a very limited blood supply and knowing that no additional units are coming your way. so they've asked us to supplement their supply and we're working on trying to do that for them. i'm. i'm case, i'm just wondering how anxious you are when you're hearing about this national blood shortage from the american red cross, you supply so much of donating blood as somebody who uses a blood donations a blood bank all of the time. how are you right now? how you watching the news? how are you following this? this must be, this must be like, no, franky. absolutely. i think there is definitely

a sense of anxiety associated with every transfusion appointment that we make. because folks like me and outside of dallas, senior there's a lot of other illnesses that require blood transfusions, you know, be, we really depend on that donors to come forward and allow us to be able to function in life. you know, it's simple things like being able to go to the grocery store and run our errands. we do require their kindness and being able to come forward. i'm just looking at what the impact might be if there's a shortage for various different reasons. somebody, we've covered some theory staff moving on and vacancies, being there, somebody with not enough people at large eyes, etc. will that impact may well be to earlier respect to cost and cunningham. and he told us the impact they were seeing at his region have a look. blood donations are down. we are seeing blood drives cancel due to lack of

turn out in a big reason for that is the ongoing pandemic. any oma chron variant? that's a big reason why people are not showing up to donate blood right now. either they're sick cases are high right now, or they're afraid of getting sick right now. and so the cases are spiking here in the state of oklahoma. and we're always concerned about the blood supply because it takes 1200 donors a day to meet our state and area needs for our local hospitals. so we're always concerned about it. but especially right now with the ongoing pandemic. it really. busy is cutting into our numbers here locally and certainly nationally as well as i can see you nothing pick up off the back. has a constant coming in that yeah, i think you just said a couple of those key points, you know, without continued bud transfusions all the time without continued donation all the time. we run into that issue very quickly. patients who i see here to make that tough decision about when their team been, you know,

the number we look at to determine whether or not he should be the transfusion start to drop it on the borderline of our cutoff trans. choose them or do we wait and see how they do when it wasn't necessarily an issue, we certainly would transfuse them. and so we're starting to have to make those decisions and i'm seeing it, especially with some of our types of blood. oh, being one of those where types of blood and basically david is saying that hospitals are getting one unit when they were used to getting 25 units. and you could see how i could quickly cause a big shortage in a hospital. yeah, and keep ahead. are you thinking i agree with evan, and the way that i want to think about this is as a primary care doctor. a lot of times i am working in collaboration with other doctors that maintain a chronic transfusion plan for patients. and sometimes i will have to make that call to say, hey, let's, let's hold off another week because maybe we can stretch this out for one more week

. but on the flip side of the patient is feeling sick. they're going to go to a e, r and the local e. r is already up to its brim, trying to deal with cove it and everything else that's going on in the hospital. so our, our effort to keep people out of the yard that's not needed me get impacted because people really do require this transfusion and there's no supply anywhere else. i've got some questions on, on youtube. david, i want to put start off with you because that's a mission that we need to boston some. some people may not be understanding exactly at how you give bit blood and who's who can get blood. so it's so this is at narrow pita and is the shortage due to the vax not being able to donate blood. so there are couple of things that you can perhaps clear out for us, or we can look at educational as well as information. i'll go ahead. thank you so

much. so yeah, there's a lot of misunderstanding about who can donate blood and who can't eat blood. and if we're actually taking and testing for vaccination, so we are routinely not performing any tests that would look for people who have either had cobra, $119.00, or vaccinated. one of the things that we're really fortunate about with this with kogan, i think, going on, is that it does not appear to be transmitted through what. so we want people to be healthy and well, or who's either had till they did sometime in the past or has been activated. so please don't not do not say you can't johnny because you are seated or hector, but that's just not the case. i another question, this is from liz rainy and, and this, this is, this is a good question. i'm going to put this one to you and keith, and liz wants to know. why haven't i heard more about this on the news? this seems to be like an under reported story. go ahead. so it's

a great question. thank you for asking the question. one of the things i think happens is a lot of times in these patients like myself out or primary care physicians, we just find another way to go about it without really amplifying the need. but we'll, we've now realize is we do need a consistent supply of blood to make sure we don't find ourselves back into this shortage in the near future or going forward ever. so we do need a little bit more amplification and the voices to be empowered to come out and request for folks to come forward. so it seems to me that this is a really timing time to have the conversation before way in a desperate situation. evan, have you ever seen a situation where you literally have no blood is not possible? could that happen? it could happen. certainly, like i said, i work out a lot of our community hospitals. small hospitals in the surrounding area and

critical access. hospitals are only allocated a short, very limited number of units of blood in the problem with the emergency department 2 is i don't know your blood type in your walk in the door and that will be very limited with what i can give you. leaving me just usually with oh, but until i have to wait an hour and a half, 2 hours to get a lab back before i can get you a specific type of blood. and so what i'm working in my small community center is we'll go over, you know, we can talk about the situation and not at all what we're looking like in terms of that what we're looking like in terms of blood situations where i've had trauma patients that i've given all of our blood to i was going to do it right. usually after that we, we basically talk to our sort of other hospitals and try to get some blood back in and, and move some things around. but it can be really hard, especially if you use all you're already we were hearing. yes. so it's i, keith, go ahead, articulate them so. sorry. i think evan brings up

a really important point that i tried to tell my patients a lot of us do not know our blood type. so one of the myths that i want to really make sure people understand is that while you know you will be subject to some sort of testing and your insurance is not going to be charged for that testing when you go for blood donation. one of the most important tests that is available to blood donors is your blood type. and it's really important for everybody to know their blood type and have their family members be aware of what their blood type is. so there's a controversial part of donating blood, which people don't always think about. but if you work in the feel, if you know what that control vesee is, 1st of all they would help us out. there's a list of people who cannot do a lot would use i could do that left for us. oh so. ready for travel is one reason why you travel to a malarial area. i think what you're getting to it. maybe i'll do the whole thing

and then you can do the content of as one right at the end. because then we can get into that. i don't know, i don't of actual things because this may, will help us with getting more blood into the system. if the few people are you cannot donate that because you fall into this pathway through the pathway. so we do want folks to be generally well and healthy, and just you certainly happy will help you know, if you have a long term chronic health issue, which would make donating blood that say for you, then we would ask you about, you know, what was that for instance, like a congestive heart failure or momentary issues, those types of things there where you really need to keep that yourself. there are certain medications and there's a medication list that's available through a dot org. or you can contact your local blood center that can tell you what medications you should not be on. and many of these are for donor safety purposes,

as well as for, for certain patient that should not receive any any of this medications for themselves are smaller travel, or travel to foreign countries where you may have infectious diseases that you recently contracted where it would not want to transmit that to another person through transfusion. and then i think as one we're menu of that sex with men within 3 months now would not be allowed to do. all right, so that's the one one's going to land on because that's the one that says that there's a lot of conversation and discussion about. so if you're a gay man or bisexual man, there's no rules about when you can donate blood. and if you're sexually active, for instance, i'm going to put a law like here who points out that this is very old fashioned. and then as then, i'm gonna hand you in to put you into the hot seat and respond immediately as to

your thoughts about this current regulation. he is la festival. as a concerned citizen, as someone who works in medicine, i want to donate blood, but unfortunately i'm as a gay person. i can't. and neither can my husband who is also a health care worker here in new york city. and unfortunately, this is a very common experience among many people in the gay, bisexual and transgender community because of a very r k, antiquated and flat out homophobic policies that the f t a has towards blood donation. evan has the conversation dying in the united states about this issue? well, i think he had some of the key things, you know, it's, it's old policies that were clearly working through you know, it used to be that if you ever had sex with a man, you know, you could not donate blood. and now we're down to the month and i think as

a detection, viral detection and blood screening has gotten better with time. we've taken a look at some of these policies and continue to have conversations about them in order to reverse that and look forward and just collecting blood from everyone. david, weigh in on it on this. thank you. you go ahead because you knew it was official that i have my mouth. so you know, the initial band on them right is, was in the age of each i b when we didn't have a test and we are trying anything to prevent transmission of each i beat the buttons, which is so that the early eighty's and totally appropriate that time and really help save a lot of i think as we develop better tests, the 1st test team on tv 5, we now do you click after testing. so the risk of getting trans receiving the j. b . 3 transfusion is about wanted to 1000000 as an estimate, and i actually think that's low. so to credibly rare occurrence. now f

d a change the deferral period from ever having a mess. and once since 972nd to in the district and 12 months, several years ago. and then in december of last year, so a little over a year ago, f d, a in the wake up, colby 19 decrease that period from 12 months to 3. there are many other countries now that are performing studies and are adapting different questions so that people are not excluded simply because of their sexual sexuality. and it's more based on actual risk factors. canada is one of those countries. in europe, there are many countries have done that, and that is undergoing current discussion today here in the night swap. all right, so let me check with you are an international headline. this is france just lifted, homophobic, blah, bad on men who have sex with men. that's what m s m means. and then earlier in our

program production, we spoke to the interim president of the human rights campaign or they, they sent us this statement and their, their, their perspective is the current policy is outdated. it does not reflect the state of the science and continued to unfairly stigmatize one segment of society. say if you are very sexually active and say that you decide you are having a sex across a, with a different gender and not with another man. nobody asks you where for you can give blood or not you. there are no rules there. you may well be more active or more risk than somebody who has a long term partner who's married and they're in the same sex relationship. so that is why there is the controversy just stating the obvious there. so that is a debate. let's look at some of the ways that perhaps we may be are to increase more blood donation and kita. i love in a tweet recently you said best, let me just share it here. ah,

here we go. since i have received more than 500 units of blood in my lifetime, i consider myself an expert blood recipient. so expert blood recipient, how do we, how do we get more people to designate? sure, i think i'm, i'm a big believer in positive reinforcement. and so this tweet, actually the contacts afer was, and my sister and my family, encouraging me to express gratitude openly to words blood donors are because one of the connections that's missing is the fact that you have all of these blood donors that come out and they volunteer their time, they want your precious resource to us and they don't hear from eyes. they have no idea who we are. so really sharing these stories as they listen, i can now go on walks with my dog and spend time with my family only because you exist and my life is indebted to you say, i would just give you blood right away. and katie, if i was the right blood type,

because look at, look at your face, how could i deny that? i would i? yes. have some take my arm, you. all right, so i'm, let's do a little explain as to what it means when you donate blood. so, we've got a little bit of an animation so that if you're thinking about a, this is what will happen to you. very likely, let's have a look. a life saving blood donation starts with a generous donor, travels through expert testing and processing, and is distributed through a dedicated team of professionals who provide it to a person in the lead star, your own blood donation journey and help save a life by making an appointment today at red cross blood dot org. see, that's really simple as david. i've got a couple of ideas back here from social media. so options trader told us on twitter, he l o they recommended a push from local towns through work and schools. making a push at sporting events, so blood drives inside stadiums. you should have a blood drive boss. why apps like major retail stores or,

or more or shopping centers into a really big push on social media. any of these that meet your seal of approval david? we do all of those things. yeah, we're constantly trying to get blood out. one of the things is that, you know, we only have limited funds as well. you know, and that, and the blood centers that collect are really dependent on, on revenue from the hospitals. and, you know, perhaps discretion is on the amount of revenue that centers receive. so they can build a strong infrastructure to be able to handle these types of challenges more easily future. but yeah, we're constantly working with the public and that's one of the reasons i really like the regional blood center model. because we work with our community and we know how to reach our donors and to be able to make sure that they can come out and donate out urge people to go to a, b, b dot o r g and find out who their local what supplier is at to go make an appointment to go ahead and donate blood and have that we have high seal, whether you're in the u. s. a. wherever you are in the world. however,

however you can help and your fellow, your fellow citizen, that's well worth doing. all right, so on youtube, evan, i'm going to give this to you. no such thing. it says, just offer some money for blood donation. problem solved, pay people for their blood. why is that not the case? and what's the issue? yeah, i think in the united states it goes back to we don't often think about blood as a trained plantation, but organ transplantation is actually what we think about it more along the lines of medicine. we don't just look at your simple blood type, we look at a lot of other factors to determine if you're the right match for blood. and so in the united states there's lots of laws about whether or not you can give oregon and those kinds of things in terms of paying for oregon. and so it falls. busy into those issues of can you pay for this and how do you the numbers people for it? i'm just going to give you i think that they are, i think there are social equity questions. so i'm sorry today that i think there

are social equity questions that go along with paying donors as well. you know, we have most of our blood donors here are, are giving of themselves and really trying to be a positive courses in society. if we're paying for donors to come and donate, it can be credibly transactional. i think that many of our current donors would stop donating it and we'd be then worrying on the most vulnerable portion of our society to give transfusions. yeah, that makes a lot of sense. david and kita. evan, thank you so much for helping us understand why there is a blood shortage from the american red cross. the supply 40 percent of the blood donated in the united states and how we may well began to get past that hump and make sure that everybody who needs it can get it. thanks for watching everybody. i really appreciate your questions and co yesterday. i will see you next time. take a

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