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(The TimesNews.com) - With five years of war behind us and more in front, Americans want to do their part for the war effort, which is a little harder to do than it was during World War II.

Current rules discourage civilian blood donations, but the Armed Services Blood Program, the Department of Defense agency charged with maintaining the military’s blood supply, has in-creased the number of civilian blood drives it conducts. And the Department has said it will change the rules allowing more civilian donations sometime in September.
Ed Burns has been organizing blood rives for the Armed Services Blood Program in Burlington for about a year, but some of these rules came as a surprise to him.

Burns is a member of the Bur-lington Harley Owners Group, which sponsors the drives with the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post and Biscuitville.

Burns, a veteran with the 82nd Airborne Division from 1960 to 1963, says the Burlington blood drives are very successful, collect-ing 40 or 50 pints of blood at a time, which is a lot more than military blood drives in larger cities nearby, Burns said.

The Blood Collection Center at Ft. Bragg sends military personnel to the blood drives to do the actual collecting and to interview donors. Burns handles a lot of the organization and the advertising, which he does through local newspapers, radio and TV stations and on fliers.

About 10 weeks ago, he got a message that military blood drives could only be conducted on federal property and that no military per-sonnel could take part in promoting a blood drive.

Burns was concerned. Since Bur-lington has an armory, there was no problem finding a location, but there was a local service member Burns wanted to have interviewed, thinking it would bring in more donors. Burns took a strict inter-pretation of the rules and took pains to make sure no service members or any recognizable parts of their uniforms appeared in any news photographs.

Burns found out later, the rules he was told abut were not new. They have been around for many years, but have not always been followed. The program limits donations to federal property because of liability issues in case someone has a bad reaction during donation.

The program does not advertise because of an unwritten agreement with civilian blood collection pro-grams that became a Department of Defense directive in 1973.

For one thing, the military’s needs have always been more modest than the civilian population’s. The military expects to collect 170,000 pints this year while the Red Cross and other organizations will collect about 13 million pints.

As needed, the military buys blood from the Red Cross, which, according to the program, costs the government an average of $180 a pint.

Established in 1952, the Armed Services Blood Program has about 81 blood banks and blood donor centers worldwide, including a blood center in Fort Bragg.

In March, Staff Sgt. Donald J. Gill Jr., who oversaw the center, told the Times-News that before the War on Terror began, the center conducted between 50 to 60 blood drives a year across the state and the East Coast. Now, they do 100 to 120 a year due to the greater need.

According to the Greensboro News & Record and the Columbus Dispatch in Columbus, Oh., the military bought more than 2,000 pints last year, mostly for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the department, there is plenty of blood available to those troops.

Part of the blood program’s mis-sion is self sufficiency, which is why it primarily draws blood from active duty military, military families, retired military and federal em-ployees.

Of course, troops who have been in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot give blood for at least a year because of concerns over malaria. Time spent in other countries where troops are stationed, like Korea, also restrict a person’s ability to donate blood for years.