I am trying to understand blood types and how O negative is the universal blood. What happens if someone receives the wrong type, I understand it can be deadly, but why?
I am trying to understand blood types and how O negative is the universal blood. What happens if someone receives the wrong type, I understand it can be deadly, but why?
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Blood types are basically like different kinds of labels on our blood. If you get blood with the wrong label, your body thinks it’s an invader and attacks it, which can make you very sick (I probably wouldn’t directly mention death to a 5 year old). O negative blood doesn’t have any of these labels, so almost everyone can use it safely, and that is why it’s called the universal donor.
If you want a better explanation just reply to my comment. I have seen many people being told off for not explaining like OP is 5 🙁
Your blood is made of a letter a, b, ab, or o. In addition to this it is also +or –
The universal donor is o-. This means any human can take their blood and not get sick
Blood has antibodies in it to reject bloods different from it. They cause your body to attack it like a germ. There are antibodies for a, b, and +. That means if you don’t have that, your body won’t like it. O- lacks all of these so anyone can enjoy it
If you receive the wrong type depending on how much you get and how fast they catch it you can get very sick or die. The bad blood will spread all through your body and cause it to attack itself. Also you are probably receiving this blood because you’ve been in a car crash or the victim if a violent crime or something so you are already weakened
If you become pregnant with a fetus with + blood and you are -, this can cause problems so they might give you medicine to help your body not reject the foreign cells like people who get organ transplants
Ahhh I love blood types.
On our red blood cells (RBC) we have little tiny flags that say “I’m a B”. It can also say “I have the RH protein”. Which makes it positive; if it doesn’t have the RH protein, it is negative.
Within our plasma (a separate element of blood, but still blood) it has antibodies. It will defend against every type of blood that the RBC is not. SO if you’re type A blood, you will have B antibodies. And vice versa
If you have negative blood (no RH protein) you will have RH antibodies.
The blood types are: A, B, AB, and O. There are only two types of antibodies, A and B. If you have AB blood, your plasma is not going to attack anything with a B or A flag, because that’s part of you.
Notice that there is no antigen for O, which means that there are no antibodies, and nothing will kill it.
SO if you have negative, your plasma will kill everything positive. But if you’re positive, your plasma doesn’t care if a transfusion doesn’t have the RH protein.
SO the type O- doesn’t have any antibodies, nothing will kill it, so everyone can have some. But a type O+ will be killed with any type of blood thats negative. Make sense?
Blood types DO NOT mix. As the antibodies meet the flags, they will fight, and the antibodies will win. This creates clotting. As your kidney tries to fix this, you will enter kidney failure, often leading to death.
Blood Cells have markers on the outsides of them that allow them to be identified by the immune system.
Red blood cells are categorized in a few groups by their markers: O, A, B, and AB
O has no markers
A has A markers
B has B markers
And AB has both A and B markers.
The immune system has antibodies, which bind to cells to identify and destroy them. Antibodies are in the plasma (non red blood cell parts of blood). These antibodies are essentially the opposite of those markers on the red blood cells.
So people with O blood have AB antibodies
People with A blood have B antibodies
People with B blood have A antibodies
And people with AB blood have no antibodies for blood cells.
So if a person gets a type of blood that they have antibodies for then the blood clots, and the cells get destroyed. Destroyed cells, especially in large quantities can cause organ failure in the kidneys. It can also cause clotting issues which comes with a whole other host of problems.
Positive and negative is a different marker on the cells called the rh factor and you guessed it the body has the opposite antibodies. So same issues as above.
There’s an interesting conundrum that comes from pregnancy. If the mom is Rh negative and the dad is Rh positive then the fetus could also be Rh positive. The mom could develop antibodies that could attack the fetus leading to a miscarriage so there are injections that help prevent the creation of the Rh antibodies to help prevent that from happening.
O- blood is considered the universal donor because it doesn’t have markers that antibodies will attack
AB+ is the universal acceptor as they don’t have any antibodies to attack the other types of blood.
There are three chemicals that can be in blood, which are (for historical reasons) called “A”, “B”, and “positive”. (“AB positive” blood has all three chemicals in it; “O negative” blood has none of the three.) If someone’s body isn’t used to one of those chemicals, it will attack and destroy any blood containing that chemical.
The attack is bad for the body, involving things like fever. The destruction of the blood of course prevents it from doing its job of carrying oxygen, as well as leaving a bunch of rubble that will need to be cleared out. These effects are going to exacerbate whatever problem caused the patient to need a blood transfusion in the first place.