World War II brought production at Lilly to a new high with the manufacturing of Merthiolate and penicillin. During the war Lilly also cooperated with the American Red Cross to process blood plasma and by war's end the company had dried over two million pints of blood, "about 20 percent of the United States' total". Merthiolate, first introduced in 1930, was an "anticeptic and germicide" that became a U.S. army "standard issue" during World War II. In the early 1940s Lilly became one of the companies mass-producing penicillin.