No turnip, but what about parent?
March 13th, 2008, 8:50 am · Post a Comment · posted by Terry Ross
BY TERRY ROSS, Director, News and Information Center, The Sun
The old saying is you can’t get blood out of a turnip. But maybe you can get it out of a parent by 
opening the door for 16-year-olds to donate blood.
That is part of the thinking offered by Ken Krueger, a spokesman for Arizona’s American Red Cross Blood Services unit, in discussing the support of the agency for a proposed state law to allow teens as young as 16 to donate blood with parental consent.
One goal of the bill is to help meet the state’s chronic shortage of donated blood. The state needs 79,000 units of blood a year, but only gets 66,000 units donated. The 13,000 unit shortage has to be imported from out of state, according to Krueger.
He thinks more than teens might donate if the law passes.
“If my 16-year-old daughter came to me and said she wanted to donate blood, I might also feel compelled to do the same thing,” Krueger told the Cronkite News Service.
Right he is.
