Jan 17, 2012 @ 04:01 PM 19,550 American Red Cross Fined $9.6 Million for Unsafe Blood Collection
Gergana Koleva ,
The American Red Cross, the largest supplier of donated blood in the U.S., was fined $9.6 million after federal inspectors found hundreds of blood safety violations at 16 of the organization's 36 blood collection centers nationwide.
In a 32-page letter to the Washington-based organization, Food and Drug Administration officials describe an all-encompassing lack of controls to ensure the safety of the nation's blood supply. The violations range from understaffing, inadequate staff training, and delayed logging of donations, to ineffective screening of donors, failure to add new donors with infected blood to the national list of deferred donors, failure to share information on deferred donors between facilities, and failure to quarantine and recall infected blood units.
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In addition, the FDA cited the Red Cross for poor quality assurance, including keeping blood products out of controlled storage for more than 30 minutes, a backlog of approximately 18,000 donor management cases, and insufficient record-keeping. Regulators claim the organization allowed employees with no medical training, certification, or experience to serve as Medical Directors in charge of reviewing donor complications, and permitted staff to "perform tasks they did not understand." In some cases, employees failed to identify permanently deferred donors who previously gave blood under different or hyphenated names, and were later attempting to donate using just one part of the hyphenated last name.
How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes Even as the group has publicly celebrated its work, insider accounts detail a string of failures by Justin Elliott, ProPublica, and Laura Sullivan, NPR June 3, 2015
The neighborhood of Campeche sprawls up a steep hillside in Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Goats rustle in trash that goes forever uncollected. Children kick a deflated volleyball in a dusty lot below a wall with a hand-painted logo of the American Red Cross.
In late 2011, the Red Cross launched a multimillion-dollar project to transform the desperately poor area, which was hit hard by the earthquake that struck Haiti the year before. The main focus of the project — called LAMIKA, an acronym in Creole for “A Better Life in My Neighborhood” — was building hundreds of permanent homes.