|World Blood Donor Day 2011| World Blood Donor Day 2011
Celebrating the Gift of Blood – On 14 June 2011, countries
worldwide will celebrate World Blood Donor Day with events to
raise awareness of the need for safe blood, blood products, and
blood services; as well as to thank voluntary unpaid blood
donors for their life-saving gifts of blood. The theme for this
year for the Region of the Americas is “More Blood Donors, More
Healthy Lives”. This theme reinforces the urgent need for more
people to become life-savers by volunteering to donate blood
regularly. Blood donation saves lives and improves health. Yet
many persons needing safe blood do not have timely access to it
and still rely heavily on relatively unsafe family/replacement
donors and paid donors. Today, 62 countries have blood
transfusion services based entirely on voluntary blood donation,
up from 39 in 2002. In the Region of the Americas only Canada,
Cayman Islands, Cuba, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Suriname
and the United States have 100% vol