January marks the start of a new year, but it is also National Blood Donor Month.
The beginning of the year is a critical period for those in need of blood transfusions as people tend to stop donating during the holiday season. The winter in general also experiences a dropoff as donors get sick more frequently.
With blood supplies running short, life-saving cancer treatments and surgeries like heart-transplants have to be pushed off.
Rodney Wilson, biomedical spokesperson at the American Red Cross, told Cheddar News that every two seconds someone in the U.S. needs a blood transfusion.
"It is a need that is coast to coast in every community across the country, and not enough people are donating. Only about 3 percent of the population has ever donated blood and yet most of us will need blood in our lifetime," Wilson said.
If you plan to donate blood, there are a few caveats to consider before heading to your local donation center. Participants must be at least 16 years old, weigh at least 110 lbs, and cannot donate more than six times a year with 56 days in between each donation.
In 2015, the Food and Drug Administration tweaked a controversial policy to lift a lifetime ban on gay and bisexual men from donating blood and said any man who hasn't had sex with another man in 12 months would be eligible to donate.
The policy was changed again in 2020 shortly after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic when blood supplies were critically low to allow gay and bisexual men to donate if they hadn't engaged in sex with men in the last three months.
A 7.2 magnitude earthquake was reported in Alaska over the weekend, leading to a brief tsunami warning.
Over 11 million Americans are under a heat advisory, with the extreme weather hitting the southern U.S.
Temperatures in central and southern California could hit 120 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend.
The World Health Organization moved to classify aspartame, the artificial sweetener in diet soda, as a possible carcinogen.
The World Health Organization's cancer agency has deemed the sweetener aspartame — found in diet soda and countless other foods — as a “possible” cause of cancer, while a separate expert group looking at the same evidence said it still considers the sugar substitute safe in limited quantities.
More than a third of Americans were under extreme heat advisories, watches and warnings Thursday as a blistering heat wave that's been baking the nation spread further into California, forcing residents to seek out air conditioning or find other ways to stay cool in triple-digit temperatures.
Tourists in central Athens huddled under mist machines, and zoo animals in Madrid were fed fruit popsicles and chunks of frozen food, as southern Europeans braced for a heat wave Thursday, with a warning of severe conditions coming from the European Union’s space agency.
A new study published in Nature has found that more than 56 percent of the world's oceans have changed color in the past 20 years, and climate change is to blame.
Recently discovered teeth of a two-million-year-old human relative in Africa could give researchers new insight into genetics.
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