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TLDR: The American Red Cross, which collects and provides about 40% of blood products in the U.S., declares an emergency blood shortage almost every year. This year, for only the second time in the organization's 145-year history, that emergency escalated into a full national crisis, and the reason runs deeper than one bad summer. A generation of donors has been quietly disappearing for over a decade, and the industry, along with the science behind blood itself, is starting to respond. (1, 3)
Almost every year, the American Red Cross declares an emergency blood shortage. This year, for only the second time in the organization's history, that emergency escalated into something rarer: a full national blood crisis. (1) What made this one different wasn't just a bad month of donations. It was the same decade-long decline in younger donors finally colliding with a summer that had no cushion left to absorb it. Let’s cover what really broke this year, why the donor pool has been shrinking underneath it for years, and where the industry, and the science, are starting to respond.
The timeline: a pattern of recurring emergencies
Type O-positive supply dropped below a single day's inventory nationwide, and the Red Cross began limiting distributions to hospitals just to preserve what little supply remained. (1) Dr. Courtney Lawrence, the Red Cross's division Chief Medical Officer, described what that means on the ground: emergency rooms and maternity wards are paralyzed when the blood on hand runs out. (2)
Type O carries special weight in an emergency. When someone arrives at a trauma center in critical condition, there's no time to run typing results before a transfusion has to start, so doctors reach for O by default, the one type safe enough to use before anyone confirms what the patient actually has. (6)
Because both O types get pulled disproportionately for emergencies, unknown-type trauma cases, and unpredictable surgical demand, hospitals draw down group O inventory faster than its share of the population would suggest. When national supply drops the way it did this summer, O is the type every emergency room depends on most, and the one it can least afford to run out of. (6)
Blood expires, and unevenly. Red blood cells last up to 42 days refrigerated and plasma can be frozen for a year, but platelets, the component patients in active bleeding depend on most, last only 5 to 7 days. (7) No matter how healthy the rest of the inventory looks, blood banks are never more than a week away from running out of something. When a shortage hits, there's nothing held back to absorb it, only whatever's already run out.
The seasonal story doesn't explain why the baseline keeps eroding every single year, crisis or no crisis. Blood donation has historically recruited young, betting on decades of future donors, and that bet isn't paying off the way it used to.
Donations from 16-to-18-year-olds dropped 60.7% between 2019 and 2021 alone, a much steeper fall than the 20-year trend on its own would suggest. (14) The federal government's own National Blood Collection and Utilization Survey has tracked a steady decline in teen and young adult donation rates going back to 2013, and even in years when national donations ticked up overall, donors under 25 kept declining. (14)
The blood banking industry is responding directly to this gap. America's Blood Centers has partnered with HOSA-Future Health Professionals, a health-careers program that has reached more than 2.5 million student members and produced over 50,000 new student blood donors through classroom education. (9) A newer collaboration with the American College of Surgeons' Stop the Bleed program found that students who completed the trauma training were 32% more likely to donate blood themselves and 24% more likely to encourage others to. (10) These are early efforts, but they are a direct answer to a specific problem: reaching donors before the habit of not giving sets in.
The fact of the matter is younger donors are giving less year over year, and the population that depends on transfusions, surgery patients, cancer patients, trauma cases, keeps aging and growing at the same time. (8) The pool of people willing to give is shrinking exactly as the number of people who need what they give is climbing.
Thankfully, there are reasons for optimism because the blood supply of the future may look very different from the one relied on today.
In July, the FDA licensed EZPLAZ, the first freeze-dried plasma product approved for use in the United States. Unlike conventional plasma, which requires cold chain storage and a thaw cycle before use, EZPLAZ is stable at room temperature and can be reconstituted quickly, a meaningful advantage in combat, rural, or disaster settings where frozen plasma isn't readily available. (11)
Plasma is only one piece of what is changing. Haima Therapeutics is developing SynthoPlate, a fully synthetic, platelet-inspired technology designed to reproduce some of the clotting functions of donated platelets without relying on the same short shelf life. The program has drawn sustained funding from the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense. (12)
Other teams are going further still, working to manufacture red blood cells rather than collect them. Safi Biotherapeutics is developing red blood cells grown from adult stem cells and, in early 2026, completed the technical transfer of a 10-liter manufacturing process, a step toward producing red blood cells at a clinically meaningful scale for both military and civilian use. (13)
Taken together, it's an encouraging picture. Plasma may eventually store longer, engineered products may replace some platelet functions, and red blood cells may one day be manufactured at scale. But none of those technologies has replaced donated blood. Not yet. For the foreseeable future, the person who walks into a blood drive and rolls up their sleeve remains the foundation of the entire system.
Because this isn't an abstract industry issue. It's hard to miss when the people who need transfusions, and the people trying to keep enough blood in supply, are part of the world MaxQ works in every day. This is a human problem and it’s hard for us to miss.
Donate if you're able, or host a drive if donating isn't the right fit for you right now. The Red Cross says three more donors at every blood drive this summer would end the crisis. Three.
References (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15)
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