Organ donation is a controversial subject for many. Many people would prefer to be buried intact without any organs or parts of the body being removed.
After having a debate with a friend over blood donation I got to thinking. When you donate blood on average you give around a pint of blood. The average human has around 8 pints of blood in them. When you die that blood is drained by the coroner before you are taken by the undertaker for the funeral preparations. That's when I had a thought "Can you use blood from a dead body?" apparently the answer is yes you can.
After reading an article on Time.com entitled 'Blood from the Dead' I got to thinking, since this blood is waste, almost in a mandatory matter, as you are not buried with blood still in your system, why can it not be reused? If we have such a large deficit of blood donors why should blood harvesting from cadavers not be common place? It is already removed so for those that do not wish to donate organs etc. there should be no added concern than already exists in the anticipation of death.
Approximately 70 million people will die per year between 2010 and 2015 according to the UN Crude Death Rate Data considering the top 10 causes of death and how many would be considered 'contaminated blood' approximately 50% of the crude death rate would be eligible 'good donors'. This represents 35 million people. Each with 8 pints of blood allowing for blood lost in certain circumstances if you halve this again to 4 pints you still have approx 140 million pints of blood per year that could potentially be used. All this beggars the question, should we use blood from the dead?
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