A new blood type discovered in France: "Gwada negative", a global exception
27 comments
·June 21, 2025ajb
xattt
Neither article talks about whether this is a minor or a major antigen.
Blood for transfusion needs to be crossmatched against antigen types of the recipient. Many patients will tolerate several transfusions of a minor mismatched antigen before developing a sensitivity. Major antigens are what cause significant reactions that can be life-threatening.
Minor antigens come into play when crossmatching for infants and premies, but this is way beyond my scope.
JackFr
I recently had major surgery and got two units of blood in during the operation and two more post-op. Post-op before I got the blood, they typed my blood again, and a nurse stayed in the room while I got the blood and I wondered why. This comment makes it clear.
xattt
Close observation for 15 minutes is typical for any blood transfusion. You do a set of pre-transfusion vitals, vitals when the blood hits the vein, vitals every 5 minutes until 15 minutes is up, vitals every 15 minutes until the blood is done. Ask any nurse why they hate running blood.
Depending on the severity of the reaction, blood will either be stopped or the patient will be loaded up with Benadryl and Tylenol with the blood running at a slower rate.
yorwba
With a single known case of somebody producing antibodies against the antigen, it might be a bit hard to say how many transfusions it typically takes to develop a sensitivity.
ajb
That's interesting; I didn't know that to realize it was missing.
curtisszmania
[dead]
firtoz
Don't tell the Koreans (Almost 6 in 10 Koreans believe in the correlation of blood types -- A, B, O or AB -- and personalities, a survey showed.)
paxys
Still more reasonable than basing your entire personality on the month you were born.
ashoeafoot
Sounds like someone born on the galaxy outward part of the spiral orbit would say.
PS: I prefer pre debunked random universal mysticism to pseudo scientific racism. Some nonsense is the more preferable nonsense.
BrandoElFollito
Or that your god is better than the other gods, because the latter are made up by people who did not discover the true meaning of faith (or something like that)
Out_of_Characte
That's where correlations of random events and placebo end and where discovery begins.
There are 'gods' that are 'better' than others. Even if the principle of what you/people believe goes against what you find scientifically relevent, or factual, or sensible. There still is something to be said about a group of people following a strange set of rules that could be demonstrably better than other sets of rules and beliefs. May it be enviromental, genetic, placebo or a tiny edge over what gives life meaning. We ended up with the gods we have today, not by coincidence, but because all the other ones failed their followers.
newsbinator
Younger generations are now heavily into MBTI. And I mean heavily: you won't find a person under 35 or so who doesn't know their MBTI letters.
BlarfMcFlarf
Yeah, cause while blood type is like horoscopes which absolutely no meaningful information, silly personality quizzes at least tell you back what you told them, so some kind of correlation exists, even if the categorization and implications are basically spurious.
kingkongjaffa
very INTJ of you
pezezin
Japanese people are the same, to the point that even anime characters have a blood type.
gwervc
Yes it's defined for fictional characters, but I have the feeling it's more due to their obsession of details. I've never been asked my blood type there in years, whereas some Taiwanese girls asked me the question.
Drugein
Well, it's definitely true to some extent, since there will 100% be some genes that contribute in some way to a person's personality that are colocated with genes responsible for blood type.
booleandilemma
It's pseudoscience, nothing more.
balanc
If the scientific community says it’s not true then it definitely must not be true.
izzydata
I remember reading something about peoples personalities being vaguely related to their names which makes even less sense. Unless peoples names subtlety influence their behavior. Perhaps if these blood type ideas are so prevalent in Korea and everyone from a very young age is aware of their blood type they might have a self fulfilling prophecy.
llm_nerd
FWIW, in trying to map normal blood types like O- or AB+ to the 47 (now 48 or 49) blood group systems, apparently that is only basically a value on the type 001 (ABO Group System) and type 004 (Rh group system). People could still have antigens that further bifurcate in the other 45+ blood group systems.
So our ABO+/- system already doesn't have information on the other 45+ systems, and this new antigen wouldn't change that high level classification.
ajuc
I'm pretty sure you could get statistically significant correlation and publish it (at least in psychology) if you really wanted to :)
petre
No worries, they won't go to set up blind dates with Guadelupians.
The OP is low on details. There is more in this article (in french): https://www.lindependant.fr/2025/06/21/il-ny-a-quelle-qui-es...
Apparently the ISBT have added this to their list: https://www.isbtweb.org/isbt-working-parties/rcibgt.html (the page still says 47 but the data tables have it added)