Some of these treatments are licensed in the US, but they're not widely used yet because some safety parameters, among other things, are being worked out.

You have to think about, okay, well, you've killed all the bacteria, viruses, uh, parasites and such, but what are the consequences? What's the negatives from those products? Do they affect the function of red cells? Do they affect the function of platelets? Do they have any other long-term effects? But I think that in terms of dealing with safety and transmission of infections, eventually we will get to the point where the units of blood have been sterilized in so many ways from these products, and then that risk will go down to almost zero.

That can be hard, of course, but in the case of blood transfusions, challenging the magic number of 10 grams per deciliter was important for a number of reasons.

Blood is a finite resource.

We don't always have enough of it, so we don't want to waste it.

If it's not improving patient outcomes, there's no reason to.

The second is while I emphasize that transfusion is safe, it's not zero safe.

There are uncommon but real adverse effects of blood, so you don't want to expose patients if it's not gonna m- improve their outcome.