Factor VIII is a medication used to treat and prevent bleeding in people with hemophilia A and other causes of low factor VIII. Certain preparations may also be used in those with von Willebrands disease. It is given by slow injection into a vein.Side effects include skin flushing, shortness of breath, fever, and red blood cell breakdown. Allergic reactions including anaphylaxis may occur. It is unclear if use during pregnancy is safe for the baby. A purified factor VIII concentrate is made from human blood plasma. A recombinant version is also available. People may develop antibodies to factor VIII such that this medication becomes less effective.Factor VIII was first identified in the 1940s and became available as a medication in the 1960s. Recombinant factor VIII was first made in 1984 and approved for medical use in the United States in 1992. It is on the World Health Organizations List of Essential Medicines. Available forms
Factor VIII is delivered by intravenous infusion. History
This transfer of a plasma byproduct into the blood stream of a hemophiliac often led to the transmission of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis before purification methods were improved. In the early 1990s, pharmaceutical companies began to produce recombinant synthesized factor products, which now prevent nearly all forms of disease transmission during replacement therapy. Society and culture
Economics
The cost of Factor VIII and similar clotting factors has been described as "highly expensive". The cost of the clotting factors is 80% of all medical costs for people with hemophilia.
Kikuyu girls cut each others vulvas in the 1950s as a symbol of defiance, in the context of the campaign against female genital mutilation in colonial Kenya. The movement came to be known as Ngaitana ("I will circumcise myself"), because to avoid naming their friends the girls said they had cut themselves. Historian Lynn Thomas described the episode as significant in the history of FGM because it made clear that its victims were also its perpetrators. Classification
The term "self-mutilation" occurred in a study by L. E. Emerson in 1913 where he considered self-cutting a symbolic substitution for masturbation. The term reappeared in an article in 1935 and a book in 1938 when Karl Menninger refined his conceptual definitions of self-mutilation. His study on self-destructiveness differentiated between suicidal behaviors and self-mutilation. For Menninger, self-mutilation was a non-fatal expression of an attenuated death wish and thus coined the term partial suicide. He began a classification system of six types:

neurotic – nail-biters, pickers, extreme hair removal and unnecessary cosmetic surgery. religious – self-flagellants and others. puberty rites – hymen removal, circumcision or clitoral alteration. psychotic – eye or ear removal, genital self-mutilation and extreme amputation
organic brain diseases – which allow repetitive head-banging, hand-biting, finger-fracturing or eye removal. conventional – nail-clipping, trimming of hair and shaving beards.Pao (1969) differentiated between delicate (low lethality) and coarse (high lethality) self-mutilators who cut. The "delicate" cutters were young, multiple episodic of superficial cuts and generally had borderline personality disorder diagnosis. The "coarse" cutters were older and generally psychotic.