Thursday, March 21, 2002
A recent flu outbreak affected a group of potential blood donors, says a Red Cross spokeswoman.
YOUNGSTOWN -- Virginia Grilli is trying to scrape up some extra cash. Karen Kelley is desperate for blood. And Russell Preston is just waiting for another disaster.
These Red Cross officials of various branches in the region all have a thorough acquaintance with hardship. After all, it's a vocational hazard of working for a human-aid agency.
This March, the month for nearly 60 years designated to recognize the Red Cross, each of them faces unique challenges. All of the chapters, the spokesmen say, are working for the same causes.
But the difficulties -- below the group's broad umbrella that shields disaster victims from the rain are in some ways varied among chapter lines.
Blood donors: Kelley, manager of communications and marketing at the American Red Cross Blood Services Northern Ohio Region, said her office has spent the month trying to drum up blood donors after a troubling dearth of donations in early March.
Every morning, Kelley said, staff members meet to evaluate the reserve inventories of blood supplies in the regional office. On Monday, they held unsatisfactory levels of five of the eight blood types.
"For type O negative, the universal donor, we're supposed to have 225 units as minimum," Kelley said. "[On March 18] we have 22 units. Earlier in the month, it was worse. I can remember when we had five units."
Ideally, Kelley said, the office will keep a three-day supply of blood on hand for the 61 area hospitals it serves. That amount is necessary because of the time it takes to process and test donations. The blood collected in the area must be sent to Cleveland, then Detroit, and sent back to Cleveland before it can be sent to a hospital for use.
Kelley said only around 5 percent of eligible donors actually end up giving blood. The cold weather and recent flu wave have combined to make the problem particularly acute in the region, she said.
Sick people can't provide usable blood, and illness depleted the 17-and-older donor pools at colleges and high schools that typically provide about 13 percent of donations, Kelley said.
Additionally, Kelley said the public perception that blood was thrown away instead of being used after Sept. 11 might have confused potential donors.
If the Northern Ohio Region doesn't collect the 900 pints a day it needs and spends its inventories into dangerous levels, it can sometimes get blood from other local chapters.
Kelley said, however, those regions are often just as low on popular types like O negative.
To illustrate the need for blood, earlier this month the Red Cross filled two jars with jellybeans. One of them had 225, the optimum amount of O negative pints on reserve. The other only had five.
"When you see it, you understand how desperate the situation is," Kelley said.
Getting better: Things are getting a little better. For the first time all month, donations on St. Patrick's Day in the region exceeded 100 percent of need, Kelley said. In contrast, on March 1, it collected only 78.5 percent of the targeted amount. In general, for the second half of the month, Kelley said, the region is pulling in around 90 percent of the blood it needs, which is promising, but not quite good enough.
"What I've found is the people in our region, when you tell them you're in trouble and you need help, they come forward," Kelley said. "I know that, if we get the message out there, people will respond. That part is heartwarming."
After Sept. 11, Grilli, executive director of the Northern Columbiana County Red Cross, saw plenty of financial response.
Donations shot out of her area in remarkable volume and rapidity to the national fund for victims of the attacks. When the final pennies had rolled in and the cash register closed, Grilli said the support forwarded by her chapter tallied $33,000, three times what the center raises locally for anything.
Earmarked: That money was earmarked for a very specific purpose, and none of it can fund any operations for Northern Columbiana County.
A golf fund-raiser earlier this month pulled in $1,400, which Grilli said fell below expectations. In total, she said the chapter aims to amass $25,000 in special event donations to help cover a year's worth of expenses.
"If you look at it in just donors' terms, many more people contributed, but the majority of them contributed nationally to Sept. 11," Grilli said. "It's a different kind of awareness now. There's a lot more publicity and more people are seeing and hearing our name. But the flipside is that some people who have already made a contribution to Sept. 11 may not contribute locally."
The challenge now, Grilli said, is persuading first-time donors of the Sept. 11 fund to contribute locally.
Right now, they offer a variety of classes in first aid, CPR and youth programs at area schools.
Grilli said if the chapter doesn't find enough funding, it could be forced to decrease some programming and education that involve travel expenses.
Russell Preston, executive director of the Mahoning Chapter Red Cross, said a Christmas fund drive and the first part of an annual fund-raising effort have fared well.
The chapter planned several special activities this month, including a "Health-o-Rama" event, free family CPR classes and a blood pressure screening program.
The group's next big event is a mock disaster workshop Saturday. It will inform participants on issues such as opening a shelter and operating a service center.
"It's designed to make the community aware, as well as volunteers, in case we have a major disaster," Preston said.
Preston said the Mahoning chapter mainly deals with single-building fires, of which they see around 100 per year.
He said his chapter hasn't dealt directly with local, large-scale devastation since tornadoes tore through Girard, Hubbard and Liberty in 1985, causing more than $3 million in damages.
Normally, he said, the Red Cross plans for those types of major disasters once every five years. Now nearly 17 years removed, Preston -- along with the 30 or 40 key trained volunteers in Mahoning County and their counterparts at other local Red Cross chapters -- keep training.
And waiting, and bracing for the worst.