Pork,
Here's a site that briefly discusses the JW mortality rate due to intraoperative anemia and blood loss based upon a study conducted from 1983 to 1990.
http://www.medana.unibas.ch/eng/educ/blood.htmThat study is significant because it is cited in the 10/15/93 Watchtower, where a Dr. Kitchens is quoted from an article he authored stating the JW mortality rate appears to increase by .5% to 1.5% for refusing blood/red cells. The doctor cautions against the liberal use of blood in his article, however, saying the risks of blood transfusion may outweigh the benefits (although no specific numbers or estimates are given in the WT article).
I forget the exact calculations, but either Dave Reed or Lee Elder once figured that if you take that study average, 1% greater mortality rate, that means that for every hundred patients that require blood, an extra one dies. In the USA, 26 million units of blood are transfused in an average year. In the UK, it is about 2 million units. Canada, about 1 million. Figure 35 million where most Witnesses live and get surgery. Calculating the number of persons transfused based upon a number of units each, and figuring that an extra 1/100 does not survive due to anemia or low hemocrit levels, then some have guesstimated that over 1,000 JWs per year die. Some say that this figure might even be higher, since the above study only refers to anemic patients in a controlled setting with low hemocrit levels. It does not refer to trauma situations, or the various other uses of blood which JWs are to abstain from which results in or contributes to either sickness or death.
My own opinion is that the numbers of JWs having died to the blood policy over the years was probably rather significant twenty years ago, but not today. The WTS has done a good job educating doctors as to their wishes, and the internet alone is full of critical sites saying how overrated and even unnecessary most blood transfusions are today. I would say that maybe perhaps 100 Witnesses die each year. I simply don't see that many news reports of Witnesses dying from lack of blood, and one would think that if the figure were in the 1000s, we would see it all the time. You know Kent would advertise them. In my local area, I only know of one person who died from refusing blood, in 1990, a JW woman who bled to death during childbirth.