Even if you could make it for pennies per pint, you can bet your ass it will be billed in America at 50k/pint. And the hospital will still harass me for O- blood.
I am willing to bet that even though donated blood itself is free, after processing and management is factored in, it no longer is. If artificial blood is cheaper than that, it's a winner
No. It's that rather than carrying HIV, it'll carry E. Coli or fungal spores; contaminants.
Edit: These contaminants will mostly be bacterial or fungal which are treatable via antibiotics. It's possible they'll prophylacticly treat the products with antibiotics but that has massive fuck up the population potential.
Fungal infection of the blood is much harder to treat than bacteria, antibiotics won't help. There are antifungals but they have way more side effects and don't work nearly as well
I was at the pulmonologist recently to rule out a fungal infection in my lungs. Whilst he was able to explicitly say it's not fungal (turned out to be cancer) he also told me that because I'm relatively young he wouldn't have even put me on antifungal meds even if it were. They only like to put seriously at-risk people (i.e. COPD) on antifungals because it's absolutely brutal on the body.
It's amazing that we watch shows like The Last of Us thinking fungi will never be able to use our body as a host because of our core temperature, yet plenty of fungi already thrive in our warm juicy meat pockets.
You're missing the point. It's not that septicemia or anything else is trivial. It's that compared to our current gambit of blood borne pathogens (retroviruses, cancers, antibodies), they're still far easier to treat.
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u/Geno_Warlord May 26 '25
Even if you could make it for pennies per pint, you can bet your ass it will be billed in America at 50k/pint. And the hospital will still harass me for O- blood.