If your pet has some problems with health and it needs some medical surgeries and you don’t know how to save him, you can ask for a help to a new community. That formed a canine blood donor program which was launched by the University of California, Davis, and School of Veterinary Medicine.

Roughly 1,200 pet dogs will be screened during the coming year to develop a group of 200 to 400 regular donors. This new donor program will allow developing a large, reliable source of blood products for patients, without maintaining a colony of donor dogs at the hospital.

The donor program and its new UC Davis Animal Blood Bank are situated in the campus's William R. Pritchard Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital.

Dogs have 13 different blood types. The preferred donor type is dog erythrocyte antigen 1.1 negative. Donor dogs for the new program must be 1 to 8 years old, weigh at least 55 pounds and have never been pregnant or had puppies. Each dog will be given a health check and screened for infectious diseases, and a unit of blood will be collected.

In addition to providing blood products for dog transfusions, the teaching hospital annually carries out 400 to 500 transfusions for cats, pigs, horses, cows, sheep and goats.

The UC Davis veterinary hospital currently is limiting its community blood collection to dogs because the tests necessary for screening the health of cats are too expensive.

The new animal blood bank will store regular blood products for all of these species. It also will store umbilical cord blood for future use and will process adult stem cells from horse patients, which can be used to treat ligament, tendon or joint injuries and promote healing of some fractures.

Now you know how to save your pets or help others to treat theirs.

References:
http://www.news.ucdavis.edu/search/news_detail.lasso?id=8551
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=88831