HOW CAN BLOOD SAVE YOUR LIFE

Continue with: BLOOD AND YOUR IMMUNITY

When Doctors transplant a heart, a live, or another organ, the recipient's immune system may sense the foreign tissue and reject it. Yet, a transfusion is a tissue transplant. Even blood that has been "properly" cross matched can suppress the immune system. At a conference of pathologists, the point was made that hundreds of medical papers "have linked blood transfusions to immunologic responses"-Case Builds Against Transfusions," Medical World News, December 11, 1989.

A prime task of your immune system is detecting and destroying malignant (cancer) cells. Could suppressed immunity lead to cancer and death? Note two reports.

The journal Cancer  (February 15, 1987) gave the results of a study done in the Netherlands:  "In patients with colon cancer, a significant adverse effect of transfusion on long-term survival was seen. In this group there was a cumulative 5-year overall survival of 48% for the transfused and 74% for the nontransfused  patients." Physicians at the University of Southern California followed up on a hundred patients. who underwent cancer surgery.  The recurrence rate for all cancers of the larynx was 14% for those who did not receive blood and 65% for those who did.  For cancer of the oral cavity, pharynx, and nose or sinus, the recurrence rate was 31% without transfusions and 71% with transfusions." -Annuals of Otology, Rhinology & Larynology, March 1989. 

Next time: HOW CAN BLOOD SAVE YOUR LIFE?/Conclusion of: BLOOD AND YOUR IMMUNITY

 From the Watchtower magazine