Pardon the pun, but it’s been a whirlwind of a summer with all the hurricanes making landfall this year. Hundreds of thousands in Houston are still without power – weeks after Hurricane Ike roared ashore. Hurricane Gustav, despite weakening to a Category-2 storm, is estimated to cost insurance providers some $10 billion, making Gustav the fourth most devastating storm to hit the U.S. (in financial terms).

Perhaps equally as devastating is the toll the storms put on relief assistance organizations like the American Red Cross. In the immediate aftermath of September 11th, the Red Cross was awash in money and blood donations. But due to the prevalence of weather-related disasters across the country and around the world in recent years, the Red Cross has been operating if not in the red, close to it. It’s estimated that relief assistance will cost the Red Cross between $40 and $70 million; they’ve raised a fraction of that.

In terms of blood donations, American Red Cross locations in Montana, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire – areas far removed from hurricane-related devastation – are urging people to donate blood; their supplies have been diverted to areas in dire need of it. Susan Palmer, the CEO for the New England chapter of the American Red Cross, told The Boston Globe that their down to less than a three-day supply; ideally, their supply is between three and five days.

While our fellow man’s need for blood is enough of an incentive to donate for most of us (the Red Cross says one person’s donation saves at least three lives), studies suggest that it can actually improve your health. And not just your moral health, but your actual physical health as well.

For one, donating blood helps get rid of excess iron that tends to accumulate in the blood. Too much iron in the blood and there’s an increased risk of various cancers, heart attack, even heart disease. By giving blood, the opposite is true.

According to a study conducted on a number of male blood donors of Scandinavian descent, blood donation is linked with a decreased risk of a bevy of diseases, including heart disease and some of the most frequently diagnosed cancers like lung, colon, liver and throat cancer. What’s more, the risk diminished in tandem with how frequently blood was donated (the more blood donated, the less risk for the aforementioned diseases).

In an unrelated study, this one conducted in 1998 and published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, a Finnish-based study concluded that of the approximately 2,900 people studied, those that donated blood were at a 88 percent reduced risk of heart attack compared to those who had never donated blood. A 1997 study published in the journal Heart came to similar conclusions.

Again, most of us don’t need to know about the health benefits of donating blood in order to do it. But it is human nature to be more apt to do something when we know it’s good for us. Donating blood happens to be one of those things that not only saves someone else’s life, but may wind up saving our own life as well.