When it comes to getting tattooed, everyone knows that needles are just part of the game. Some people aren’t bothered in the least about being jabbed in the skin repeatedly, and some don’t like it but just suck it up because the end results are totally worthwhile. However you deal with the idea of needles, the bottom line is that if you’re tattooed, you’ve dealt with them and it wasn’t that much of a problem.
That being said, often without knowing it, tattooed people make up a great portion of the potential population for donating blood. After all, if you can sit for hours at a time getting tattooed, then one quick needle to donate blood isn’t really much when you consider the good that you could be doing. The Red Cross in Illinois announced this past April that tattooed donors no longer had to wait one year to donate blood after being tattooed. This certainly helps out in the rather desperate need for blood that the Red Cross faces. Still, the need for blood changes from place to place, country to country.
Every year in Australia, one in three people need blood transfusions, yet the Red Cross is having a difficult time finding even one donor out of every 30 people. This could be a problem of the past now that the Australian Red Cross has changed their 12-month waiting period for people with tattoos to a 6-month waiting period. The biggest issue with this change is that many tattooed people in Australia have no idea that the law has in fact been changed.
‘”The Red Cross recently cut that waiting period to six months, but they have not contacted the deferred candidates to inform them of the change.
“No one contacted me about the changed waiting period,” says regular blood donor, Kate Fox, a sub-editor at Pacific Magazines.
“I was told I would have to wait until next September before I could donate again,” she says.
Fox has only been able to donate blood twice in the last two years since getting her tattoos.
“I always thought that after having a tattoo you had to wait 12 months before giving blood.”’
Perhaps it would be an even better idea if the Australian Red Cross completely eliminated any sort of wait for potential tattooed donors given the current necessity for blood, but as it stands right now the waiting period is six-months, which in retrospect is better than the previous 12-month wait. So if there’s any tattooed Aussies out there reading this and you didn’t know that the rules have changed with regards to giving blood, now you know. Spread the word!