Medicine: Rush

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Bottled human blood is one traveler that always has top priority on the Military Air Transport Service planes flying from the U.S. to Korea. There is no time for delay in the shipment of whole blood. Even under the best refrigerated conditions, it goes bad within three weeks, yet a steady supply of it is essential.

Back in Washington last week after shepherding one load of 300 pints of blood to Korea, sandy-haired Navy Commander Mary Sproul, onetime head of the armed forces' blood laboratory at Fairfield Calif., gave reporters a description of how fast blood can flow across the Pacific. Commander Sproul's consignment, like all the blood used by the services, was collected by the Red Cross from donors all over the nation and shipped to Travis Air Force Base at Fairfield by air, rail and refrigerated truck. Tested and packed in 20 ice-filled plywood boxes, it was piled less than 14 hours later into the cabin of a MATS transport.

Less than 50 hours after the takeoff, Commander Sproul stood in the evacuation hospital at Hamhung watching a pint of the precious fluid flow into the veins of a wounded G.I. from Wisconsin. Each pint of Red Cross blood is marked with the city of its origin. Commander Sproul saw the boy grin when he noticed that his pint was marked "Madison, Wis."

An average of 8,000 pints of whole blood a month has been taken in this way from healthy veins in the U.S. to depleted veins on the Korean battlefields. Only two pints have been lost from breakage since the operation began.