IStock Photo 3109765 © vladislav mitic

Blood rituals are not merely reserved for the vampires in Twilight. In fact, 86-year-old Joseph E. Higginbotham of Newark, New Jersey, has his own ritual that might make a vampire drool. Every 56 days he donates blood—he’s been doing it since 1963. The American Red Cross has taken more than 65 gallons of blood from his body, making him a chart topper in the league of multi-gallon donors. Other bloodletting champions hover around 20 gallons, though several have made it to the 30 - 40 gallon mark.

The Red Cross, which acquires nearly half of the country’s required 14 million units of blood and red blood cells, makes a point to recognize high-volume donors, but since the recession hit in 2008, its praise has done little to bolster numbers. Regions of the US that were affected most by the recession showed the most noticeable drops. These numbers are most visible in areas with large corporations that host employee blood drives—more laid-off workers means less blood to donate.

And donating blood was never overwhelmingly popular in the first place. In 2006, a mere 1 in 23.42 people 17 or older donated blood. That’s almost equal to the odds that an American lives in the state of Illinois (1 in 23.57), leaving 49 states’ worth of potential blood donors on the sidelines. Plus, a large portion of people who donate are doing it for the first time (1 in 3.5).

But amid the shortage, an untapped set of donors is anxiously awaiting a turn. Since 1983, the FDA has prohibited gay men—or any man that has had sexual contact with another man since 1977, even if it was just once—from doing their part. The rule was born out of the AIDS epidemic, when a disproportionately large number of gay men contracted the virus, but even now that all donated blood is carefully screened for blood-borne diseases such as HIV and AIDS, homosexual men are still banned. The same rules apply in the United Kingdom, but that country is now in the process of revisiting the issue. It is suspected that the regulation could be lifted in the UK by 2010. In the US, revising the rule could provide a valuable source for deficient banks.

Blood is needed for transfusions every two seconds in this country, for a wide variety of ailments: trauma, heart surgery, organ transplants, and cancer treatments, to name a few. And different patients require different blood types. Type O-, which is the blood type for 7% of people, is especially useful to have on hand, since individuals with any blood type can use it. AB- is rare—only 1% of people have it—and is therefore in short supply in the blood banks. 38% of people have O+ blood, 34% have A+, 6% have A-, 9% have B+, 2% have B-, and 3% have type AB+.

There is no synthetic substitute for human blood. Without blood donations, patients in need of transfusions would not survive. The charity of others is, therefore, mandatory in modern medicine.