NO: VA hospitals analyze blood for exactly the same reason and methods
any other hospital laboratory does. Research labs may be analyzing
blood for new treatments and to research diseases.

You can try some biological supply businesses, but you probably need to
document that you are an accredited learning institution.

That analysis is what we and every other clinical lab does with
patient's blood. And as I explained earlier, I analyzed my own blood
and the blood of my fellow students.

Haven't we been through this discussioin before??? You're going to get
the same answers.

And again you don't seem to be explaining yourself very clearly

hematoxylin and eosin ?

May Grunwald/Giemsa or lieshman's might be more conventional.

Why would you want to do this? This is hardly "study" or "research" - this
is something that's done hundreds of times every day in most haematology
labs.

What you *seem* to be wanting is to use fifty-year old technology to perform
what is a very routine procedure.
If you could explain what you're after you might get more help.

I don't think you realize what you say in your posts. You obviously
don't know how blood testing works.

The VA is NOT the only laboratory in the world. Why the VA fixation?
Laboratories perform various analyses on blood, either whole blood,
plasma, or serum, depending on the test that's ordered by the physician.
Blood samples must be fresh and analyzed within a certain period of time
or the results of the analysis will not be accurate.

A blood bank can either be an entity like the local Red Cross, which
supplies all of the units of blood for transfusion in my geographic
area, or other entities depending on the geographic location of the
hospital. Units of blood are collected through blood drives or at the
Red Cross. They are only good for a specific amount of time and outdates
are watched closely. Blood is collected in a preservative with a
specific outdate for each unit. These units can be split into various
components for transfusion by the ARC - platelets and fresh frozen
plasma being the two I thought of off of the top of my head.

A second definition of "blood bank" is the actual department in the
clinical laboratory who cross matches the blood that comes in from the
local supplier (ARC in our case) in order to allow a patient to be
transfused. Blood typing and screening for antibodies are involved here.
The blood from the patient to be transfused is collected from the
patient, brought down to the lab, typed and screened and crossmatched
against a specific unit of blood in the blood bank's inventory. When
everything matches, the blood is sent to the floor or the operating room
and the transfusion begins.

What do you mean by "inspection"??? Do you mean someone peering at RBC's
under a microscope? That is not going to tell you much. In a wet
preparation you just see a lot of little round RBC's dancing around. On
a stained smear (which one of the posters mentioned) you will see RBC's
fixed and dried. Slides are prepared as an adjunct to a CBC (complete
blood count) daily in thousands of laboratories world wide. Certain
morphological characteristics of the WBC's and RBC's are double checked
under the microscope if the automated system flags the count as having
something odd about it. The hematology technologist reads the slide and
reports what they see (too complicated to go into here). If they see
certain types of cells pathologists must review these slides, especially
if it looks like a newly diagnosed leukemia or other blood problem.

http://tinyurl.com/5hyz9w - page that talks about morphology and shows a
histogram of an automated blood count. Instrument shown on website is
quite old. They are much more sophisticated nowadays.

The components of blood - red cells, white cells, and platelets - are
analyzed by the millions daily with automated counting equipment world
wide. There are many manufacturers of automated blood cell counters.

http://tinyurl.com/5aujc6 - Coulter website with many analyzers listed.
I used Coulter as an example as it is one of the big manufacturers of
blood cell counters. There are others. Since I don't work in Hematology,
I'm not familiar with them.

http://tinyurl.com/6b44g9 - this article compares four different
analyzers

Virtually nobody analyzes these components manually any more. Again, if
something is abnormal, the trained hematologist will make a slide called
a "differential" and look at the cells manually. Again, the blood must
be fresh to analyze these things.

H&E stains are used in Histology, not hematology. I haven't worked in
Hematology for many years, but I believe Wright's stain or Wright-Giemsa
stain is the basic stained used for differential smears. There are other
stains that can be used in Hematology but these are the main ones.

I know of no supplier who will just send you blood for "inspection" or
"study." You sound like you have some sort of fantasy about studying
blood or something, and you are not based in reality.

What exactly do you want to "inspect"???? Do you want to work in
research? Are you at a university? What's the real deal?

Judy Dilworth, M.T. (ASCP)
Microbiology