PLA New Dog Tag

duncanidaho

Junior Member
Afaik there is no problem for Rh(+) persons to receive Rh(-) blood. It will only cause problem, if a Rh(-) person get Rh(+) blood, but only the second time.

So there won't be any problem, if they use only Rh(-) blood as donor.
 

schenkus

Junior Member
Registered Member
Afaik there is no problem for Rh(+) persons to receive Rh(-) blood. It will only cause problem, if a Rh(-) person get Rh(+) blood, but only the second time.

So there won't be any problem, if they use only Rh(-) blood as donor.

I fear in a crisis they might run out of blood fast, unless China imported a lot of Rh(-) blood from countries with a bigger Rh(-) population or somehow got all Rh(-) to regularily donate blood for the armed forces.
 

Iron Man

Major
Registered Member
Do we know if the PLA lets Rh(-) personnel join its ranks ? Nowadays they might just not allow them to join up, if they feel this would be too much logistical trouble. If there are some regions where Rh(-) is more common, they might make exceptions for units from places where it would be easier to provide Rh(-) blood.
I'm not sure why it would be a logistical burden to stock a small percentage of their blood banks with Rh(-) blood in keeping with the general population frequency of the Rh factor. It's no different from civilian blood banks. The source of the blood does not necessarily have to come from military personnel either, so they would have the entire population of China to draw upon.
 

schenkus

Junior Member
Registered Member
I'm not sure why it would be a logistical burden to stock a small percentage of their blood banks with Rh(-) blood in keeping with the general population frequency of the Rh factor. It's no different from civilian blood banks. The source of the blood does not necessarily have to come from military personnel either, so they would have the entire population of China to draw upon.

I don't know anything about the logistics of military first aid, I just guess that you would want to be able to treat the soldiers soon after their injury and need the blood relatively close to the front lines. If you have a seriously wounded soldier you might need quite a lot of blood so having just 1% of (for example) a few hundred blood bags with a suitable blood type would not necessarily be much help. But if you need more than 5% of your blood in a "rare" blood type to get enough blood of this type to your field hospitals it might be a problem getting enough blood donors of this type.

If any field hospital stocked a few thousand blood bags instead of a few hundred (or you assume that you have suitably fast access to a bigger blood bank), this should not be a problem.
 

Iron Man

Major
Registered Member
I don't know anything about the logistics of military first aid, I just guess that you would want to be able to treat the soldiers soon after their injury and need the blood relatively close to the front lines. If you have a seriously wounded soldier you might need quite a lot of blood so having just 1% of (for example) a few hundred blood bags with a suitable blood type would not necessarily be much help. But if you need more than 5% of your blood in a "rare" blood type to get enough blood of this type to your field hospitals it might be a problem getting enough blood donors of this type.

If any field hospital stocked a few thousand blood bags instead of a few hundred (or you assume that you have suitably fast access to a bigger blood bank), this should not be a problem.
You would obviously stock enough to treat for what you expect to need, not just a single bag of Rh(-) blood or even a couple. The percentage of Rh(-) blood needs to be sufficient relative to the rest of the blood supply, not on some kind of absolute basis. If your division of 10,000 personnel has for example only 100 Rh(-) personnel, you carry enough to treat the kinds of injuries and the number of personnel that you project will need a projected amount of the Rh(-) blood.
 

vesicles

Colonel
In addition to actual blood, many field hospitals also have blood substitutes. Kind of like synthetic blood, which contain synthesized hemoglobin and does not contain any antibodies and hence won't cause side effects. These blood substitutes can temporarily help the patient before actual blood can be found.

Whatever situation it may be, it cannot be excuse for not indicating the Rh types for soldiers.

It is however hard for me to believe that the PLA omitted the Rh types all together, given how much experience the PLA has with battlefield medicine.

The PLA has fought some brutal battles from the WWII to the Korean War to Vietnam, where they suffered heavy casualties. They should be very experienced with battlefield medicine. Especially that the Rh type thing is not new at all. Even if the PLA hasn't fought in the past 30 years, they should be well aware of the Rh types and how important it is. This is a country with some of the most advanced medical researches and researchers who can go toe-to-toe with the best in the world. It is virtually impossible for them to miss this. It's almost like the PLA came out with a new riffle but forgot to put in a trigger...

It must be incorporated into the tag in some way that we still don't know...
 
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taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
I'm not sure why it would be a logistical burden to stock a small percentage of their blood banks with Rh(-) blood in keeping with the general population frequency of the Rh factor. It's no different from civilian blood banks. The source of the blood does not necessarily have to come from military personnel either, so they would have the entire population of China to draw upon.
I see a difference between peace time/civilian hospital and war time field hospital.

Let's say this setup being adequate, 1 civilian hospital severing 10,000 people in the area need to stock 1,000 bags of blood including 1 being Rh-.

In war time, there need to be 10 field hospitals severing 10,000 soldiers which need 1,000 bags including 1 bag of Rh-. It is numerically adequate. But splitting that 1 bag Rh- among 10 hospitals saves nobody. Transferring 1 Rh- soldier from a field hospital without the right blood to another one may be prohibitive or too late. To guarantee Rh-, you will need 1 Rh- in every hospital, that increase the logistic demand 10 fold considering you have to collect 9 times more Rh- than actually necessary and 1/10 available among the population.

I am aware of ethnic minority soldiers from western China who may have a higher probability of being Rh-. But they are mostly put into units that are predominantly from the same or similar ethnic background such as ethnic platoon and company, therefor they may receive special arrangement (special tag perhaps and field hospital in the area with higher Rh- stock). For the rest and majority of Chinese (Han or Mongol etc.), maybe Rh- would not be recruited to avoid logistic problem.

A side note, I don't know and was not told of my Rh type although I have done many blood tests. Kind of telling how Rh type is "overlooked".
 

DaKai

New Member
This is definitely wrong thinking. Rh(-) might be rare but if you give Rh(+) blood to someone who is Rh(-) he/she may DIE from a transfusion. This is the reason no matter what the percentage of Rh positivity exists in the Chinese gene pool, it is and will be a listed characteristic of a soldier's blood type. Whether an average Chinese citizen knows what Rh group they belong is totally irrelevant to whether the PLA knows whether an individual PLA soldier is Rh(+) or Rh(-). A blood test to determine ABO/Rh type costs a few dollars and it is ridiculous to think that cost is any kind of barrier to accurate information on soldiers' blood types.

I didn't say they SHOULDN'T do it, I was trying to guess why they DIDN'T do it.
It's not like PLA never had a identification system before: it's a tag printed on the back of the collar insignia, or just the inside of the collar.
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They have beeb using the ABO blood group system only for some decades, and now PLA simply decided to transplant a working (but not perfact) system from fabric and ink to metal and chip, which the later is still a beta test version.
Also, I didn't implying that it's OK to put a soldier's life at risk, I was trying to point out that to change somthing in a organization with more than 2 million members, it took money and TIME.
 

DaKai

New Member
We don't actually know that they don't specify Rh- for the rare soldiers who do have that blood type. The denotation scheme might very well be 'default positive' unless otherwise specified. It's too early to say for sure if Rh- personnel are accommodated.
There Are Rh- PLA soldiers. Here's a news about a military hospital seeking for A- blood donor on social media to save a soldier from heat apoplexy.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Also accroding to multiple comments online, it seams that most hospitals in China, including military hospital, do no store a lot Rh- blood in their blood bank, instead they will keep in touch with the Rh- blood donors for emergency.
 

Iron Man

Major
Registered Member
Let's say this setup being adequate, 1 civilian hospital severing 10,000 people in the area need to stock 1,000 bags of blood including 1 being Rh-.

In war time, there need to be 10 field hospitals severing 10,000 soldiers which need 1,000 bags including 1 bag of Rh-. It is numerically adequate. But splitting that 1 bag Rh- among 10 hospitals saves nobody. Transferring 1 Rh- soldier from a field hospital without the right blood to another one may be prohibitive or too late. To guarantee Rh-, you will need 1 Rh- in every hospital, that increase the logistic demand 10 fold considering you have to collect 9 times more Rh- than actually necessary and 1/10 available among the population.

I am aware of ethnic minority soldiers from western China who may have a higher probability of being Rh-. But they are mostly put into units that are predominantly from the same or similar ethnic background such as ethnic platoon and company, therefor they may receive special arrangement (special tag perhaps and field hospital in the area with higher Rh- stock). For the rest and majority of Chinese (Han or Mongol etc.), maybe Rh- would not be recruited to avoid logistic problem.
Where did you get 1 unit of Rh- blood per 10,000 soldiers from? Yes, that is clearly inadequate. Even 10 ten times that much is inadequate. On the other hand, making an argument this way is like saying that spreading one MRE amongst 100 soldiers in a company is clearly inadequate. Also, your assumption that civilian hospital blood banks don't transfer blood from other hospitals/blood banks due to this being cost- or time-prohibitive is definitely wrong. In fact for rare blood types this is the USUAL method of obtaining blood.

There Are Rh- PLA soldiers. Here's a news about a military hospital seeking for A- blood donor on social media to save a soldier from heat apoplexy.
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Also accroding to multiple comments online, it seams that most hospitals in China, including military hospital, do no store a lot Rh- blood in their blood bank, instead they will keep in touch with the Rh- blood donors for emergency.
So, I did some digging around on the internet and at my local hospital (a 220 bed complex). Here is an Excel spreadsheet which lists the ABO/Rh blood types in the first column, the worldwide prevalence of various blood types in the 2nd column, then China and the US prevalences in the 3rd and 4th columns, and finally the number of units present at the local hospital (on average) for each blood type.

ABO.png

As you can see, both O+ and O- blood units are over-represented in the blood bank compared to general prevalence in the population, and for reasons which will soon become apparent. The tech intimated that for B- and AB- blood (and the even rarer blood types), they do not routinely stock them and have to call around and see where they can get these units, if these blood types are needed. I assume that in the case of the average Chinese hospital/blood bank, A-, B-, and AB- will all NOT be routinely stocked, but both O- and O+ will be overstocked (relative to population) like in the US. Incidentally, donors who are O- (and to a lesser extent O+) tend to be significantly overrepresented in blood bank donations because they know they are the universal donors and tend to donate more generously than other people.

The general transfusion protocol involves typing and crossmatching the exact blood types before transfusing the patient. If the blood type is unknown/has not yet been determined and the patient needs immediate transfusion, O type blood will be given. O- blood is reserved almost exclusively for children under 18 and childbearing-age women, and even then they are only given O- until the exact blood type can be determined (usually within 2 units or so assuming they go in at ~1U/hr), after which they switch to the appropriate type. O+ blood is given to all adult males and post-menopausal females until the proper blood type can be determined. Even if the patient later turns out to be Rh-, the risks/benefit ratio will typically favor transfusing over waiting for a match. The reaction doesn't actually even happen the first time an Rh- person receives Rh+ blood (no anti-Rh antibodies have yet formed), and most don't even end up making antibodies to Rh at all despite the exposure.
 
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