Make a Local Blood Bank Deposit

This time they are out for blood.

The nation’s growing range war over blood donors flared in Ventura County last week when the nonprofit United Blood Services, which has served the county for 21 years, accused the Red Cross of trying to cop a few corpuscles on its turf.

The American Red Cross recently called for blood drive volunteers in Ventura County and announced plans to hold half a dozen blood drives here next month. It has already held such drives in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo.

Arizona-based United holds contracts to supply blood to all Ventura County hospitals. That means blood collected here by the Red Cross will almost certainly wind up in the veins of people elsewhere--most likely in Los Angeles County.

That concerns United officials, who say Ventura’s supply of donors rarely exceeds its own demand. All it takes is a rainy January or a long holiday weekend like this one to push Ventura County’s stash of blood reserves toward the danger zone.

Since the age of AIDS arrived in the 1980s, collecting and testing blood and screening and tracking its donors have become much more expensive. With growing concern over health-care costs in the ‘90s, providing blood has become a cutthroat business.

The Red Cross, most familiar for its disaster relief work, fills about half of the nation’s blood needs. Until recent years, it divided the market with smaller, community-based blood banks in a way that avoided open competition for donors. That has now changed.

Blood banks everywhere are hurting these days, and that is absurd. Donating blood is one of the easiest, cheapest, most satisfying ways in which people can contribute to their community. It takes about an hour, hurts less than a flu shot, you get free juice and cookies and no, it doesn’t make you fat or impotent, as some persistent folk myths suggest.

About 5% of Ventura County citizens are registered to donate blood, says United spokeswoman Carolyn Tyner. That is in line with the national average (and better than L.A. County’s 3% donor rate), but we can do better.

The Red Cross should go back to respecting the turf of long-established community-based blood banks. And Ventura County residents should do a good deed and donate.