Real Vampires?

I watched a re-run of CSI a couple nights ago, where the murder victim was a vampire. Vampiress? Female vampire. She wore fake fangs that had been custom made and belonged to a vampire "court", where she and her homies fed off the energy of each other. She wanted more. She wanted to drink blood. The other girls were all "ew". (Yeah, I'm with them!) The bad guy had real fangs that he'd allegedly been born with. Once he bit into her neck, puncturing her artery, he held a container and collected the blood that was still being pumped out.

So, being the curious person that I am (while I enjoy reading and writing about fictional vampires, I know next to nothing about people who claim to be real ones), I got on the Internet. This is what I found:

There are three basic "types" of vampires: those who feed off blood, those who feed off energy, and those that do both. Blood Vampires can get their nourishment from different sources (i.e., donors, blood from a rare steak, etc.). If this type of vampire doesn't have a regular donor, he/she will be in a consistently "thirsty" state of mind.

Apparently, there are a lot of sub-types of the Energy Vampire: empath, elemental, sexual, astral and others. Some energy vampires will claim that they can only feed off of one specific sub-type, regardless that energy is energy. (To me, this would be like a blood vampire saying he can only drink O negative. But, hey, what do I know? Nuttin.)

The "dual-feeders" use both blood and energy interchangeably.

From what I can determine, most blood vamps use medical equipment (think phlebotomist, here) to draw the blood, although some vampires (and some donors) prefer the good old-fashioned bite. Either way, the donor is facing potentially serious infection and/or death. If instruments are used and they aren't properly sanitized, the donor can be infected with any number of bloodborne pathogens (can you say HIV/Aids, Hepatitis, Septicemia and Spongiform Encephalopathy (the human version of mad cow disease--called Spongiform because of the effect it has on the brain.) to name a few. And if the vamp decides to bite... well, let's hope he/she misses the major arteries (located in the neck, groin, inner thigh, wrist, upper arm and so on). Otherwise, the vampire's gonna have a very dead person he/she needs to try to explain. And if the vampire bites, well, the human mouth has more germs than any other animal in nature. Ick.

Jeez Louise. Talk about complicated. Give me my fictionalized vampire hero any day of the week and eight ways on Sunday. Whether he's hampered by daylight or garlic, he doesn't have to worry about infecting his donor with some kind of nasty disease or infection.

Maybe that's part of the allure. He is dangerous, but--from a medical perspective--he's safe. :)