From this week, blood banks under Sanquin are testing whether blood plasma from recovered coronavirus patients can help new patients. Health service GGD will contact recovered patients and ask them to make contact with the blood bank.
Participants will be asked to donate blood plasma a total of four times, at seven day intervals. Sanquin will remove the antibodies from cured patients' plasma and process it into Fresh Frozen Plasma (FFP), which can be given to Covid-19 patients via transfusion.
Blood bank Sanquin is looking or non-Western donors and will therefore launch a campaign to persuade people with a Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese or Antillean background to become a blood donor, NOS reports.
According to the blood bank, there are currently few people with a non-Western background who donate blood and they are desperately needed. People of Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean descent often have a different blood type than people with a Western background, according to NOS.
A massive fire broke out after an (suspected) explosion near the Leiden University Medical Center today, the Safety Region Hollands-Midden reports.
There is less and less demand for blood. The demand for donated blood has decreased in the last three years by 15 percent
