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.
Using a new blood test, researchers from the Dutch blood banks under Sanquin will carry out a national population screening for coronavirus Covid-19. The aim is to find out how widely the virus is spread and how quickly society is building up immunity against it, AD reports.
The researchers will test the blood of thousands of blood and plasma donors to find out whether those donors have produced antibodies against the virus. This will show how large a group is already resistant to Covid-19 in the Netherlands.
Gay men must be able to donate blood if they have safe sex, according to the VVD, D66 and GroenLinks. The parties want blood bank Sanquin to lift the restrictions on gay men donating blood if they live a monogamous life. They asked Minister Bruno Bruins for Medical Care to investigate whether this is possible, the Telegraaf reports.
Currently blood bank Sanquin does not take blood from men who have had sex with a man in the past four months. This is because men who have sex with multiple male partners are at higher risk of being infected with HIV or hepatitis, for example.
A new invention from blood bank Sanquin means that the abolition of animal testing is one step closer. Sanquin developed a new test to see if medicines cause fever which uses donor blood instead of the current method of using rabbits. Currently 400 thousand rabbits die through this testing per year worldwide, including around 500 in the Netherlands, RTL Nieuws reports.
The Erasmus MC teamed up with PostNL, ANWB and blood bank Sanquin to launch an experiment with delivering medication and blood directly from the lab ot the hospital or from the hospital to the patient's home by drone. The idea is that drone deliveries will be much faster, as they can avoid traffic jams.
"The goal is to see if we can get medicines to people faster", spokesperson David Drexhage of Erasmus MC in Rotterdam said to RTL Nieuws. "An whether that is safe." The experiment started on Thursday and is expected to last three years.
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 large shipment of stem cells will be slowly and carefully transported from Leiden to Amsterdam, under police escort, on Wednesday. This is expected to cause some inconvenience for motorists on the A4 highway, where at least one lane will be closed, a spokesperson for blood bank Sanquin told NU.nl.
The transport will start around noon, the spokesperson said.
There is less and less demand for blood. The demand for donated blood has decreased in the last three years by 15 percent
