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Gunson et al's 'Fifty Years of Blood Transfusion' stated that the use of citrated blood increased towards the end of the war.

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The British Red Cross formally began its transfusion service limited to urban areas at first because it depended on "walking donors" giving their blood directly.

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Dr Janet Vaughan was influential in creating four transfusion depots around London, administered by the Medical Research Council.

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In preparation for the war regional depots were set up in Newcastle, Leeds, Nottingham, Cambridge, Birmingham, Oxford, Cardiff, Manchester, Liverpool and later Belfast.

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Sir Colin Walker in the foreword to 'Fifty Years of Blood Transfusion' stated that "our blood supply is amongst the safest in the world but, even so, medical advice is always likely to be that the best transfusion is no transfusion".

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The Army Blood Supply Depot was set up with a donor pool of around 5,000 and over half a million donors by the end of the war. In total 756,046 donors were bled during the war.

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Fifty Years of Transfusion Medicine' described how blood could be freeze dried by the Second World War which made it easier to transport. During the course of the war dried plasma was also issued to the British allied medical services and to civilian hospitals.

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In 'Fifty Years of Transfusion Medicine' it stated that a unit for drying plasma was constructed in Cambridge (later relocated to Elstree) and one for the North in an underground site at the Royal Infirmary Edinburgh.

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The Edinburgh Journal reported the successful transfusion of 22 Ozs of blood to a woman with severe uterine bleeding.

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In a letter to Dr Robb-Smith Dr William d'A Maycock stated that he agreed that users must be told that plasma was a potentially lethal fluid which should be used with discretion.

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An article in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that plasma, as well as other forms of transfusion therapy, should be administered only when the clinical indications are absolute, so that the benefits to be derived outweigh the risk of contracting homologous serum jaundice.

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The Scottish Home and Health Department stated in a circular that all blood for transfusion must be regarded as potentially contaminated and the most important transmissible disease was homologous serum jaundice or serum hepatitis, and no transfusion should be undertaken unless the benefits outweighed the risk of hepatitis.

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In and about 1939, Dr Cohn and his colleagues undertook a systematic study of the fractionation of blood plasma proteins.

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The expert report prepared for the Infected Blood Inquiry described HIV as a virus that preferentially attacks and kills particular cells, the CD4 T lymphocytes that control the immune system and thereby allow the body to fight off infection.

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The expert report prepared for the Infected Blood Inquiry stated that if antiretroviral therapy (ART) is initiated early enough life expectancy approaches that of the general population and normalisation of T4/T8 ratio appears mostly only achievable upon early ART initiation and has been associated with a lower risk for non-AIDS-defining events.

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A lecture on Christopher Wren's medical discoveries described how Wren handed over his experimental work to Richard Lower who later experimented with the direct transfer of blood between two dogs using hollow goose quills and tubing.

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An extract of a letter written by J Denis published in Philosophical Transactions described how Dr Jean-Baptiste Denis transfused blood from a lamb to a boy suffering from fever.

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An article in Philosophical Transactions journal described an experiment where blood was transfused to a man who survived without ill effect. The experiment was first conducted on a sheep.

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A book on the history of blood transfusions discussed the beginning of transfusions in the 17th century and how a servant died after a series of blood transfusions of calf blood, which caused the French parliament to ban the procedure.

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An article in the British journal of Anaesthesia described why the use of blood transfusion was discredited in the 19th century due to failed experiments because of the misunderstanding of the physiology of the blood and misconception of the therapeutic role of blood transfusions.

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