Don't know about Albania. In United States, deaths from transfusion are supposed to be reported to the FDA, who publish a summary. It doesn't look like the stats are broken down by age.

That said, in a given patient, it may be very difficult to determine whether or not a transfusion was the cause of death. Many times, blood products are given in an ICU setting to patients with life-threatening problems. If death occurs a few minutes or hours after a blood product, the attending physician may or may not attribute the demise to the transfusion.

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Joseph T. Malak, MD

Thanks for the response. The FDA thread indicated that about 223 deaths from 2005-2008 were attributed directly to blood transfusions.
The other statistic I was wondering about. With Jehovah's Witnesses in the United States, are there any statistics on the number of deaths that my have occurred as a direct result of refusing blood transfusions?
Thanks.

This may be difficult to determine because in some deaths from not getting blood transfusions there was no treatment provided at all, in the past when the trigger points to a blood transfusion were higher than they are today some doctors would not operate even in emergency if their hemoglobin would drop below that. Studies later came out that a person can tolerate much lower levels of anemia than previously considered safe.

The media often sensationalizes stories about the blood issue even with Witnesses that died of trauma and other lethal injuries or from the disease itself. There was one case where the lawyer of a drunk driver spread it through the media in an attempt to save his client from being convicted manslaughter. The attending doctor stated in court that she only had a 5-10 percent chance of living no matter what they did. Not that this is what you were asking for but the man was convicted.

Anyway, in a video produced by Jehovah's Witnesses in 2000 or 2001 doctors from one of the busiest trauma centers in the US stated that they operate on 3000 Jehovah's Witnesses per year and they do not have a higher mortality. Another truama professor stated the same thing, although quick and tight control of the situation should be taken with stopping bleeding and restoring volume with plasma expanders being the most important.

While I am not stating that you can't ever die without a transfusion, there are around 160 bloodless treatment programs in the US that treat various conditions, the world leader in bloodless medicine Englewood Hospital is in the USA and has treated Witnesses from over 40 countries.

If the question about Jehovah's Witnesses relates to children the only way they could die without a transfusion if it should occur, would be if an adolescent was allowed to make his or her own decision as a mature minor.


P.S.

It was stated in the video mentioned above by physicians familiar with Witnesses that with the most of the alleged cases with Witnesses (typically mentioned in the media) to say that they died merely from refusing a blood transfusion is an oversimplification of the facts.

I don't know if they have any official statistics.

In my experience it is impossible to say for sure that a patient died purely from not receiving a blood transfusion. The media will use this ambiguity to sensationalise the death, especially where minors are involved.
In most cases the patient would have died anyway, from the trauma or the terminal illness anyway. As is documented very well on this site and in medical journals, if the patient is reasonably healthy and has a blood count as low as 4 but gets fluid into the circulatory system to replace blood loss (standard practise in ambulances in the UK) they have a good survival rate.
It would be interesting if the media could report the deaths of people who were given blood and died in spite of it (not because of it) - this is always documented and would be available if they asked, but it wouldn't sell newspapers.....

i don't have any statistics but i just wanted to mention that our daughter was born w/some major congenital heart defects and has had several open heart surgeries starting when she was only 2 days old. she has never had a blood transfusion and her recoveries have always been much smoother and faster than other kids with the same surgeries! her surgeon has commented that he truly believes that it dramatically cuts down on many of the risks and even makes him more careful during operations.
through my personal experience i feel like we have been protected from extra complications by making the decision not to except blood for our daughter even though it was by no means an easy decision to make.

This is a fine thing to write about, a fine experience. Would you let us to post this comment on our bloodless medicine webpage?
Health

Thanks -

yes, of course you can.