B L O O D

[fansongecho]

Hi Maverick7! 

Do you know why we have some many blood groups please?.. and why do we need to type match them during emergency and other transfusions ?  what would happen if the recipient did receive the wrong blood type ? (death / some kind of physiological shock I guess ? IE a bad day for them) and do you know what the blood types are for other mammals Dolphins , Whales etc ?? (I am genuinely interested)

Cheers!

Fansongecho 

[Maverick7]

sure, here's a breakdown

1. The major blood groups for transfusion of 'homologous' blood are the ABO and the Rh system. Homologous means blood donated by others. Autologous means blood you bank yourself,

2 The major antigenic reactions which CAN cause kidney failure, intravascular hemolysis and complement cascade (all bad) will only be affect by these and if you've never been transfuse or pregnant (IOW your blood mixed with blood not your own, either a fetus or a transfusion) then the really only worrisome highly antigenic group is the ABO system.

3. The Rh system can also be bad in the case of a woman who has anti-D in her blood stream (her being Rh negative for the major D antigen), if there's passage over the feto-maternal can cause 'Hemolytic Disease of the Newborn'. There can also be problems if there is some other antigenic mismatch but let's just talk about HDN.

They realized that if they give the Mother an injection of weakened anti-D called RhOgam, or Rh-immune globulin, it can mitigate the tendency of the mother to mount an antigenic response to her baby (first pregnancy) and then she won't form a potent anti-D which might cause HDN to the second baby if it is also Rh positive.

The major guideline to all of this is a simple rule. You will/can form an antibody to any antigen you lack. The 'antigens' are on the blood cell (the RBC or red blood cell or erythrocyte) the antibodies are in the plasma, or that straw-colored stuff that occurs when blood is centrifuged.

The 'naturally occurring' antigens are really only the ABO blood group system. An A person has anti-B in their plasma/bloodstream. A B person has 'anti-A' in their blood stream. An AB person (having both antigens) has no ABO antibodies in their bloodstream and an O person has both anti-A and anti-B in their bloodstream.

Of those naturally occurring antibodies, anti-A can be the most problematic because a person can have such a potent A antibody that it is called 'Hemolytic anti-A' and it can cause very bad things if you give, say A blood to an O person if the O person has hemolytic anti-A in their own blood. A single millimeter of A blood going into an O person with that can activate 'complement' and you can have a massive cascade of your body over reacting to that, all of your blood start hemolyzing and you end up with kidney failure partly due to having all of those membranes blocking the but in general it's called an amnestic response. BUT, we did have one person who got a whole unit of A blood and being an O person we though 'wow' but nothing at all happened. They cleared that blood and the went on as normal. But I would NOT want challenge them again because like a person who gets a bee sting it's the second challenge that is bad

Now why do we have so many blood groups. Well it's not really a purpose, but that people discover these antigens by finding an antibody response to them and when the run the antibody against a panel of known laboratory cells (which come in little bottles), the find a pattern which turns out to be one of the discovered antigens

Some of the antigens are actually soluble in the blood, some have a role in membrane integrity and so on and so forth.

But here's the kicker. When those become important is when you do an analysis called a blood phenotype, usually used in cases of paternity testing or some kind of tissue transplantation, you look for and test for the person's entire Genotype which might looks something like this:

A/O, (Dce/DCE), M+N+, Kell negative, KpA neg, KpB pos, Duffy A pos, Duffy B neg, and on and on. We don't have to phenotype every single antigen but we do look for the major ones which have an 'antigenicity' or the ability to cause a reaction (in the case of a tissue transplant) and we want to find a donor who is a phenotypically identical as possible so there is no unnecessary challenge to the tissue.

As to paternity testing we look for antigens that can and can't occur in an offspring when the 'putative father' is tested knowing the mother's phenotype. An O/O mother and a putative (or prospective) Father who is also O/O can not have a A baby. So we say that 'father' is ruled out.

I know that's a lot of science but it's pretty basic and don't worry MANY if not MOST doctors do not understand immunohematology.

HTH.

[Maverick7]

OK, I missed the other part of your question. Yes we know the blood types of dogs, horses, probably other mammals and they are often very different.

I don't recall off the top of my head but some mammals like dogs generally can get blood from any other dog, I think. You could easily google that searching on 'canine blood types' or 'equine blood groups' (equine=horse).

In horses there are 8 major blood groups: A, C, D, K, P, Q, U, and T. Of these, A, C, and Q seem to be the most likely to stimulate an antibody response when given to a horse that is negative for them.

Dogs have more than 12 blood groups, and their red blood cells may contain any combination of these since each blood group is inherited independently. The most important of these is called Dog Erythrocyte Antigen (DEA) 1.1. Typing of blood donors and recipients is done before transfusion.

Dogs that are DEA 1.1 positive (33 to 45% of the population) are universal recipients - that is, they can receive blood of any type without expectation of a life-threatening hemolytic transfusion reaction. Dogs that are DEA 1.1 negative are universal donors.

So a vet who is doing dog surgery would keep a supply of DEA 1.1 negative blood (usually in the form of frozen or packed cells which use a device to safety thaw them, I would guess), and then they could handle any blood loss. But usually they would not need to give a dog 'red blood cells'. Instead they would give them plasma or to keep the from having a problem with the volume (a heart is a pump and must have a base pressure to work well).

They could also give a tissue expander, artificial plasma or something but I'd guess not being a Vet they try to minimize blood loss during surgery which is usually minor stuff. I mean you don't try to do a heart transplant in a dog, except as a research project to study surgical techniques and stuff using 'animals'.

Uh, I'll go look up whale and dolphins...

There is an abstract about blood grouping of Killer Whales and the main take away is that blood grouping data is 'scarce'. You can understand this because it is hard to do a population study and gather information of an elusive animal like a whale or a dolphin or a porpoise (marine mammals) because it's hard to collect blood on enough of them to get a cross-section that is meaningful.

They DO have antigens, the do differ, some groups show the same pattern and others show a different one. The only reason you would do this is if you need to do surgery on a Killer whale, a valuable asset to something like a Sea Park, I suppose.

But I'll put the link in anyway in case it helps:

https://www.vin.com/apputil/content/defaultadv1.aspx?id=7312353&pid=14818&

[space otter]

  dear Maverick7

please let us know where this info comes from...

are you reading and sharing this from somewhere
or
is it personal knowledge from something you are doing
and if it is something you work with what is your background ?

personal knowledge shared is very much appreciated

thanks

[space otter]

http://www.bloodjournal.org/?sso-checked=true


Blood Journal

Leading the way in experimental and clinical research in hematology

[space otter]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/blue-blood-worth-dollar60000-a-gallon/ar-AADll0Q?li=BBnb7Kz

Bloomberg
Blue blood worth $60,000 a gallon
Leila Hussain  6 days ago

The horseshoe crab is effectively a living fossil—it's been on Earth for 450 million years. But in just a few decades, humans have presented what is arguably the biggest threat yet to their continued existence.
In the 1960s, scientists discovered that horseshoe crab blood could be used to detect even the smallest amounts of harmful bacteria. Since then, the pharmaceutical industry has been using it to make sure our injections, vaccines and surgical implants are all free from contamination.

And so, every year along the U.S. East Coast, 500,000 crabs are collected, cleaned, measured and then drained of as much as one-third of their copper-based, baby-blue blood. Collections also take place across the eastern shores of Mexico and China. Demand for the blood is high—it's been called blue gold and is reportedly worth up to $60,000 a gallon.

The horseshoe crabs are released back into the ocean soon after the bleeding, but it's estimated that 15% die as a result of the process. Combined with the use of horseshoe crabs for bait, habitat loss and sea level rise attributable to the climate crisis, some estimate that the crab population has fallen by 80% in 40 years.

But there's already a way to slow their demise—at least when it comes to our Dracula-like tendencies. Almost two decades ago, a professor at the National University of Singapore created a synthetic solution that may be more effective than horseshoe crab blood at making sure our medical supplies are safe to use. It's potentially cheaper, too.

For decades, however, the pharmaceutical industry preferred to keep bleeding the horseshoe crabs.

Related video: What makes Horseshoe crabs interesting? (provided by WUSA-TV Washington)