Yes, It’s Taken Until 2023 for Period Products To Be Tested Using Actual Blood

It’s not every day that I read something that makes me want to roll my eyes so far back I could see the inside of my skull. But it happened roughly a month ago when I first came across <a href="http://press.psprings.co.uk/srh/august/srh201895.pdf" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">a recently published study on menstrual products</a> done by a team at Oregon Health & Science University and published in BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health. Of course, there’s nothing unusual per se about research on menstrual products, but this was the first one ever to test the absorbency of those products with… actual blood. Yup, it’s taken until 2023 for us to realise that maybe, just maybe, using saline solution or water — the latter is more common — for that purpose isn’t going to bring us the most accurate results. Because, as most people with a basic knowledge of chemistry should know, water, or even salty water, isn’t blood. Who would’ve thought, huh? You’d think, though, that since nearly half of this world’s population either used to, is, or will be menstruating every month for years at some point in their life — fun fact: <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10014781/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">each day, approximately 800 million of us do</a> — we’d have this eureka moment ages ago. And quite a bit of menstruation-focused research by now. <a href="https://medium.com/the-no%C3%B6sphere/yes-its-taken-until-2023-for-period-products-to-be-tested-using-actual-blood-de3f6f12275a">Learn More</a>