Give plasma
DINs patients are treated using a medicine that no factory can make.
It has no synthetic version and no chemical recipe. It can only come from one place: another person. The complicated process of its making begins with something most of us carry around without ever thinking about it — plasma.
Plasma, the blood’s fluid
Let a sample of blood settle, and a little over half of it turns out not to be red at all. It’s a pale, straw-coloured liquid. That’s plasma — the fluid that carries your blood cells, your nutrients, and, most importantly here, your antibodies around your body.
You’ve had it your whole life. You’ve just never had a reason to picture it.
Your plasma can help people with DINs live a normal life
Those antibodies are the part that matters. Gathered from many donors and carefully purified, they become immunoglobulin therapy — the concentrated dose of healthy antibodies that helps calm the misdirected immune attack in dysimmune and inflammatory neuropathies.
Which means that there’s a substance your body makes in abundance that is, for someone else, the difference between holding their disease steady and losing ground to it.
Giving plasma is easy and safe
Plasma is the component of your blood that comes back the fastest — your body replaces it within a day or two, long before you would ever notice it was gone.
During a donation, the plasma is separated out and your red blood cells are returned to you. You leave with everything that takes longer to replace still in place. The session is supervised from start to finish and usually takes about an hour.
In other words: you have plenty. You’re only lending the part you can spare.
Plasma, Treatment & therapies, Understanding the diseases
Help patients with DINs, give plasma!
You may have started reading this unsure what plasma even was. Now you know it’s something you carry in abundance, that your body restores almost at once, and that the medicine it becomes can be made from nothing else — no factory, no substitute, only a donor like you.
It really doesn’t take much to share.
Where and how to donate
The rules for who can donate, and where, differ from one country to the next — so we’ll keep this simple. Your national blood or plasma service holds the details that apply to you: eligibility, locations, and how to book a first appointment.
Plasma / Blood donation — Official national services
List of regional transfusion centres (CTS): https://www.ints.ro/site/centre-de-transfuzie-sanguina/
Other countries and regions
European Blood Alliance directory:
U.S.A — Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association (PPTA)’s center locator:
https://www.donatingplasma.org/donation/find-a-donor-center
South America and Latin America:
In Asia, donation is run country by country. Since the Red Cross and Red Crescent handle many of the donations, one helpful resource is the IRFC directory:
https://www.ifrc.org/national-societies-directory
Good news, the directory lists the websites for all Red Cross and Red Crescent societies around the world. Not just Asia, but 191 countries worldwide.