ABO/Rh Blood Types Affect the Adequacy and Resilience of the U.S. Blood Supply

• Activity Number: 466
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
• Sponsor: Section on Risk Analysis
• Author(s): Arianna Simonetti*+ and Mark O. Walderhaug
• Companies: U.S. Food and Drug Administration/CBER and U.S. Food and Drug Administration
• Keywords: Blood Supply ; Stock and Flow Model ; ABO blood groups ; Rh type

Abstract

Understanding how much blood is available daily is of extreme importance to enable effective planning of strategies to minimize collection and donation disruptions to the blood supply in case of national emergencies. We developed a Stock-and-Flow simulation model of the U.S. Blood Supply to obtain quantitative estimates with uncertainty of blood availability disaggregated by ABO/Rh blood types. Modeling the blood supply by blood groups is essential in order to capture specific dynamics of the system as, for example, shortage of some rare blood types may have important public health impacts. We generated ABO/Rh type group predictions based on donation patterns and U.S. phenotype prevalences and implemented rules for blood use that allow for compatible blood to be selected and removed from inventory when the exact match blood type is not available during the simulation of blood demand. We observed variation in reduction up to 60% in the overall supply and investigated also for each blood group in case of a decrease in the total amount of blood available to the system and in the supply of specific blood types. We explored what conditions lead to a major loss of certain types of blood.