1. Plasma is 92% water, 7% protein, 1% minerals, plus vitamins, sugar, hormones, and enzymes. Plasma composed of about 55% of the blood volume and the remaining 45% are made up of red cells, white cells and platelets.

2. Everyone has an ABO blood type that is inherited in the same way as your eye and hair colour. IN Singapore, 40% of our population are Blood Group 'O', 25% Group 'A', 29% Group 'B' and 6% Group 'AB'.

3. Almost all Chinese are Rhesus positive and about 80-85% Caucasian are Rhesus positive

4. English physician James Harvey discovered the circulation of blood in 1628.

5. First documented blood transfusion to human (from lamb) is 1665 by Jean-Baptiste Denis in France. The transfusion of animal blood to human was banned 10 years later because of severe transfusion reaction.

6. James Blundell (a British Obstetrician) performed the first documented human blood transfusion in 1818. The patient suffered from severe bleeding after delivery and the donor was the patient husband.

7. Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian physician, discovered the first 3 human blood group (A, B, O) in 1900. He received the Nobel prize for this discovery in 1930. His discovery also enabled blood transfusion to be given safely to majority of the human.

8. The first blood bank was established in a Leningrad hospital in 1932.

9. Red cells are produced in the bone marrow at the rate of about 17 million cells per second.

10. Early Egyptians and Romans prescribed blood orally as a life-giving tonic and to transmit youth from donor to recipient. Aztecs people painted their bodies with blood and bathed their kings in it as part of their tribal rituals to appease the gods.

11. Cats have three blood types, horses have seven blood types and grasshopper's blood is white.

12. If all the blood vessels in your body were laid end to end, they would reach 60,000 miles.

13. The average human being will pump 48 million gallon of blood during their life-time.

14. Barbers became known as professional bloodletters in the middle ages when blood letting was a popular cure for many diseases.