Student has blood drawn by blood drive personnel

CVHS blood drive proves successful

October 23, 2023 Grace Lopez

The annual CVHS blood drive was held in the aux gym on Oct. 4 from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Many students and staff donated blood to help save lives. As a matter of fact, “One pint of blood can save three lives,” said a doctor that was working at the annual event. According to one of the doctors working the event, one donation of a pint of blood takes about five minutes to draw. That’s not too much to ask to save a life.

Those students who were over 16 were able to donate. Besides the benefit of saving lives, volunteers are rewarded with the added benefit of money and food. According to the volunteers, those that got blood drawn said that the process was very gentle, and they were constantly being checked up on. Four out of ten students say the pain lasted for maybe a second. Six out of ten said there was no pain.

Stanford Blood Center has many locations, including Palo Alto and Menlo Park. They also offer services like Bloodmobile. This service is a mobile blood donation center. When the Stanford Blood Center occupies a location, they are collecting blood from volunteers for three days. Not only that, the center visits two to three high schools per week, each for one day.

Their vision is “Connecting our communities to provide hope for healing.”

The Stanford Blood Center is very important in the blood donation world. It has reached many important milestones. One of which is that this center was the first in the world to test routinely for cytomegalovirus (CMV) and provide CMV negative blood for immune-compromised transfusion recipients.

In 1983, Stanford Blood Center was the first blood center to screen for AIDS contaminated blood, using a surrogate test T-lymphocyte phenotyping, two years before the AIDS virus antibody test was developed.

Students, staff and doctors were very pleased with the attention and turnout that the event had. Walking into the aux gym you could see many students after donating blood, conversing with each other. These students and many others were very passionate knowing what they were contributing to.