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Funding for the American Red Cross comes primarily from individual and corporate donations. They are funded by the people to serve the people.
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This group is a volunteer organization and is not a goverment program. Its disaster relief is based primarily on the desire of people to help others. The volunteers are not legally mandated to help, they do it because they want to.
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The American Red Cross was founded in 1881 with the experiances of the Civil War still fresh on people's minds. After touring Europe and seeing the swiss Red Cross in action, Civil War nurse Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross to provide disaster relief and first aid both on the homefront and the front line. Early on, the Red Cross served to educate the public about topics such as first aid and water safety, while starting nursing programs and providing assistance to the military and military families. As new needs, such as blood donation, made themselves apparent, the Red Cross met these needs, starting donation programs and doing labratory research on the blood dontation technology and techniques starting in the 1960's.
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One of the red cross' major concerns is the extreme differences in nature that can be found with almost all disasters, and being able to allocate the correct resources at the correct time. It is also a volunteer organization with funding primarily coming from donations, so being able to maintain its workforce and revenue is a constant challenge.
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This organization does not claim to have new or novel way of responding to disasters, however their uniqueness lies in the sheer number of disasters of all sizes they respond to. This is best characterized by the information found on their page titled "Disaster Relief," which states the following:
"We respond to an emergency every 8 minutes
No one else does this: not the government, not other charities. From small house fires to multi-state natural disasters, the American Red Cross goes wherever we’re needed, so people can have clean water, safe shelter and hot meals when they need them most."pece_annotation_1473351417
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With every new disaster it faces, the ARC draws much on its own research and the experiances of the Global Red Cross. Recent major domsetic disasters the ARC has faced include Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy,
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The Red Cross is a large national organization with fixed sets of stockpiled resources which they adapt and apply to each disaster response they face. They set up shelters, distribute emergency supply kits and provide food and medical service in the aftermath of disasters.
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The red cross relies on notification systems of disaster to mobilize their volunteers such as those created by FEMA, NOAA, and other goverment services, transportation infrastructure and technology to move supplies and people from place to place, established red cross infrastructure of supply stockpiles, specialized vehicles, and training centers.
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Approximately 90 percent of the American Red Cross membership is volunteer, drawing people from all ages, ethnicity, and background. These volunteers respond to nearly 70,000 disasters every year, mostly home and apartment fires. They also put on training programs and blood drives.
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The Red Cross opened a Red Cross R&D in 1961 to further existing research on blood component technology, blood safety, plasma-derived therapeutics, transfusion medicine, and biomedical science. Red Cross R&D has made accievements in the following areas, listed on their website:
- Developed a technique to freeze red blood cells, preserving their viability for up to 3 years, helping to ensure a steady supply of red cells for patients needing rare blood types. (1971)
- Contributed to the development of bar-coding for blood products. (1977)
- Developed procedures for large-scale purification of therapeutic blood proteins like gamma globulin and factor VIII. (1978)
- Collaborated with scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to define the window period—the length of time between infection with the virus and the earliest stage in infection that can be detected by a test—for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) following implementation of universal HIV testing of donor blood. (1994)
- Investigated the prevalence of blood-transmitted diseases like human T-lymphotropic virus-1 (HTLV-1) and Chagas disease, providing key data that led to implementation of testing for these diseases. (HTLV-1 in 1987, Chagas disease in 2008)
- Continue to facilitate improvements in bacterial testing of blood products.
- Investigated the role of antibodies in female-source plasma in causing transfusion-related acute lung injury (TRALI), leading to reduction in the incidence of TRALI by providing male-predominant plasma for transfusion. (2009)
- Modified height and weight restrictions for donors younger than 19, which has significantly reduced adverse reactions among young donors. (2009)