Slashdot Mirror
Blood Type: NULL
slank writes: "Oxygent popped up in the latest (print) Wired magazine. It's a milky-looking synthetic oxygen-carrying substance that's intended to replace blood in some cases where transfusions would normally be necessary. This means less donor blood shortages and a lower risk of disease transmission due to contaminated blood. Oxygent also works with all blood types, so there's no chance of making blood type mistakes." Is anyone else thinking of Ash from Alien?
Get a full transfusion, then when you get a cut, you'll bleed milky white, and everyone'll think you're a robot!
PigPog.
Oxygent carries *only* oxygen. It is intended for short term use only. If you were dependant on this stuff for a long spance of time your cells would starve to death and turn necrotic.
This stuff is going to help lighten the demand for blood donations not eliminate it.
-----
If my facts are wrong then tell me. I don't mind.
Now the appathetic US public doesn't have to get their collectively lazy ass off the couch and donate blood.
If you don't like your neighbors, you can leave at any time.
I know for a fact that lots of older (over 40) people stopped donatig blood regularly when the blood banks stopped extending the free blood to the families of donors.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
In the middle 80's there was an series of experiments that followed the same guidlines. The scientests were looking for a chemical that could carry the oxygen to the cells that was not blood. At the time the best thing they found was a form of a flourocarbon that was liquod at room temperature. As I recall they drained the blood from a dog and replaced it with the flourocarbon and three days later they put the dogs blood back and the dog suffered no side effects. But them CFC's were found to be a carcinogyen (damn spelling) and the idea was droped due to the chemical symilarities. I guess they finally got over it because oxygent is a perflourocarbon.
On a sidenote the stuff that they used in the abyss is also a oxygenated perflourocarbon emulsion and it really does exist. See here for deatails on the early experiments.
Also see here under the technology heading for more info on reasearch into sythetic blood. Untill now PFC have been toxic which was a major downside to using them.
JOIN !LINK CLUB!
I think fashion model waifs have already been using this product. It may explain how they keep so thin if they can't carry energy around their body. It also explains how they keep their nice Anemic and sickly look that make all the boys swoon.
I read the entire site about Oxygent and everywhere it keeps saying how it delivers oxygen to the cells much much more efficiently and quickly than normal blood cells. The first adverse effects occur 2 hours after infusion and that's just elevated body temperature. Oxygent will also thin out your blood due to its small overall size thus allowing for easier blood flow.
My question is, just prior to an athletic event (or even an exam for that matter) you dose up on this stuff. It won't necessarily help with energy delivery but the extra oxygen that hits your muscles and brain cells will help extremely. Muscle fatigue occurs mostly because of lack of oxygen to the muscles after all.
Remember that X-Files episode about people drilling holes in their skulls to allow better oxygen access to the brain and how that would enhance brain functions? Well, this stuff will do it for you with a big shot.
If it can live up to what it claims, it could be really really interesting.
from Aliens. Bishop was a much better android than Ash. Primarily becaus Lance Henricksen(Hendricksen) kicks boo tay as an actor.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Get a full transfusion, then when you get a cut, you'll bleed milky white, and everyone'll think you're a robot!
Sure. But you'd have problems before you got cut.
I'm sure that this stuff is meant to fill up your bloodstream to avert the most immediate causes of corporal damage from excessive blood loss. But it's not a replacement.
Nutrients are dissolved in your bloodstream, and they feed your cells. You'd very rapidly start to run out of energy. Your body temperature would drop, your heart rate would slow, and you'd die like a campfire with no wood.
Your cells excrete carbon dioxide and other wastes, which are dissolved in your bloodstream and are disposed of by your kidneys and lungs. If, for example, the blood replacement doesn't dissolve CO2, it never osmoises through the cellular membranes, and your cells essentially suffocate.
Does this stuff have a clotting mechanism, or are you going to bleed to death from a paper cut?
And, your immune system is a blood-borne system. With no immune system, you'd be in exactly the same position as an acute AIDS patient.
Either way, this is not a permanent replacement for blood, you're not going to bleed to death in designer colors, and I'm sure this stuff confers absolutely no benefits to your body except as a very temporary replacement in the case of an accident-induced blood shortage.
I wonder how effectively the body will get rid of this stuff as it replaces it?
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
rh is the rhesus virus I'd imagine then (I always thought it had something to do with monkeys - -whayt do I know?)
What are A and B against?
As others have pointed out, this isn't a new idea. People have been trying for fluorocarbon-based blood substitutes since at least the 80s. So far, none have been clinically viable; they ended up costing too much, or having nasty side effects, or having no shelf life, or something along those lines.
The manufacturers claim it's perfectly safe. Of course they will. The data they've collected is probably quite solid, too. There are two obvious problems:
1) As other people have pointed out, previous attempts have turned out to be carcinogens.
2) Some really nasty side-effects only show up in a small percentage of people and don't become apparent in clinical trials. Think about Viagra. Worked great in trials. When every other man in the country takes it, some guys with heart conditions die. No way to detect that in a standard study sample. I'd be willing to bet money that there are patients who will (for whatever reason) have violent and possibly life-threatening reactions to Oxygent.
One of the neat things about this if it works, though, will be seeing how religions handle it. There are some groups (Jehovah's Witnesses come to mind) which do not accept blood transfusions because the Bible says people should not consume blood. This isn't really blood, so I'd think it should be OK, but I'm curious to see how those societies react. One could make an argument that it's "cheating", and God hates cheaters.
I used to be an EMT, but am way out of certification, so don't take this as gospel, but...
Most critical issue when assesing a patient: is he/she getting oxygen? So you check and clear the airway first. But then you have to make sure that once the oxygen is in the body, it is actually getting used by the body. So check the pulse and the blood pressure. If either are out of range, you've got trouble.
At a scene or in the hospital, one of the most difficult things to deal with is loss of blood, especially if it is on a massive scale. If your patient is losing blood quickly, you've got to replace that liquid quickly. In Emergency Medicine circles, people talk about the Golden Hour. From when the blood pressure drops, you have about an hour to significantly help that person. If you stabilize the blood pressure in that hour (presuming no worse problems like cardiac arrest, cerebral events or blocked airway), patient's chances of full recovery increase significantly.
In the field solutions? Well, if it's a pulse problem , you've got big issues, but they're usually solved by a defibrillator. If it's blood pressure, you've pretty much only got Mass pants to use. These increase blood pressure in the trunk of the body by squeezing the legs.
Once you get to the hospital, you've got other options. One of the first things to do is to match blood type and start forcing blood into the body. The loss of volume (thus, the loss in oxygen-carrying capacity) must be made up. If you can't match blood types immediately, or the situation is particularly dire, you might manufacture blood pressure by injecting large amounts of relatively harmless saline.
This product is interesting because it's essentially a more healthy version of saline. Where saline simply adds blood pressure (while not helping with the associated problem of loss of oxygen) this stuff could actually add volume and oxygen. A one-two punch. Very useful.
--Pax