The American Red Cross says there's an emergency shortage of blood for transfusions.

In July, the national supply dropped by more than 25%.

The Red Cross says the only solution is more blood donors.

Jessa Merrill is director of biomedical communications at the Red Cross.

Jessa, how did we get here?

What led to this?

Sure. Thanks so much for having me here. There are a number of factors that have led us here. For one, the last few months have been extremely hot. So that heat alone, while hasn't just impacted, you know, our ability to enjoy the outdoors,

it's actually impacted about a hundred blood drives in July alone for the Red Cross.

And what I mean by Impacted,

it means that those blood drives either started late

or ended early because the facility in which we were hosting,

so that could be your local community organization, church, you name it, that those rooms were too hot.

A blood drive needs to be cool for people to have a good experience.

Think of like the grocery store, right, when you walk in, it's sort of a naturally cool environment.

But in addition to that, we've seen really severe weather already in the month of August,

right? We've seen remnants from Hurricane Debbie flood most of the East Coast. We've seen tornadoes throughout the

Midwest. And then we've seen wildfires out west. And those disasters and those severe weather impacts have canceled 60 blood drives just this month alone.

And that has caused about 1,500 blood donations to go uncollected.

So in addition to having blood drives either, you know, start later and early, we

also see that fewer people are out and about, right? They're heeding the cautions that

public officials have said. They've said stay indoors, don't travel if you don't need to, move slow, pick

your activities wisely, and so we just sort of see lower blood donor turnout when it's hot.

...