People with a negative blood type
If someone halfway across the world is struggling to find a blood bank with their rare blood type, a golden blood carrier can save the day. Their blood can be donated to literally anyone via transfusion, and most importantly, to those within the Rh system with rare (significantly less rare, to be clear) blood types. Well, except for people with golden blood: Rh-null.
#People with a negative blood type plus
(RhD proteins, broadly speaking, determine whether your blood type’s got a plus or negative sign tacked on to the end of it.) There are 61 possible antigens that go into that designation. There are subdivisions from there, predicated on the presence of RhD proteins.
In order to understand Rh-null, know that there aren’t just eight blood types (A+, A-, B+, B-, AB+, AB-, O+ and O-). As a recent Freethink article summarizes: “It’s worth its weight in gold.” Doctors routinely call it “the golden blood” for its ability to save lives. The “golden” moniker is in reference to the way that medical professionals discuss the blood type. What is it? For starters, it’s not golden-colored blood. That’s Rh-null, also know as “golden blood.”Ī few years ago, the magazine Mosaic highlighted the extreme unlikelihood of being born an Rh-null carrier - of the roughly seven billion people living on the planet in 2010, only 43 were known to be living with so-called golden blood. That said, there’s one blood type that puts the rarity and universality of O negative to shame. It’s in high demand because it’s so rare (only about 7% of the population has it), and it’s the blood of choice for emergency responders. O negative blood is an elegant workaround to this issue. The immune system prepares to throw fisticuffs, determined to destroy invaders, even though its host desperately needs the blood. Normally, these antigens are treated as “foreign” during an attempted transfusion (assuming the receiving party doesn’t have them). “Universal donors” are hounded by blood banks throughout the year for their precious supply, which lacks A, B and RhD antigens on the surface of red blood cells. If your blood type is O negative, you’re used to being the popular kid at the school dance.