A leap forward in blood safety for potential transplant patients
Thalassemia is a genetic blood disorder, the patients suffering from which need blood every few days throughout their life to survive. Thanks to the contribution of regular voluntary blood donors, now thalassemia patients get supply of blood and escape untimely death during childhood. Sankalp Program for Thalassemia Cure has done pathbreaking work in enabling cure from thalassemia by offering bone marrow transplantation to these patients. So far more than 150 children have been cured through transplants with success rates comparable to the best centres across the world.
A fully matched related donor is the best donor for such transplants and Sankalp centres are getting 90%+ outcomes for patients who have such donors. Sankalp is making steady progress in making transplantations available to more children and has been successful in offering transplants from partially matched parents with good outcomes. Before a patient is taken up for such transplants there is a risk of the patients (who continue to receive blood transfusions) developing some specific antibodies which increase the chance of rejection of the donor’s bone marrow. The only way to prevent the formation of these harmful antibodies is to give blood to patients from carefully selected appropriately matched donors. Sankalp’s SAFE BLOOD Program is an initiative to have a pool of HLA typed regular blood donors who donate blood at-least 3-4 times a year whose regular blood units are carefully selected and appropriately transfused to these patients to prevent formation of these harmful antibodies.
As a regular blood donor, this is a unique opportunity to amplify your contribution of blood by ensuring that it enables a child to have a safe cure. Besides donating blood every 3 months there is nothing more to be done from the donor’s side.
Eligibility criteria
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Healthy regular blood donors with weight more than 55 kgs.
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Willing to donate blood 3-4 times a year
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Willing to travel to designated blood centre to donate blood
How it works?
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Once a donor enrols for this program, a sample is taken to determine their HLA type. This is a very expensive test and is being done free of cost to both the donor and the patient only for this program.
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Once the HLA report is received, the donor is invited to donate blood every 3 months.
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The donor is free to donate blood outside working hours and on weekends. In the vast majority of cases the blood donation requests are not urgent.
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Annual additional medical tests are done to ensure that the donor continues to have enough blood for themselves even if they donate regularly.
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Patients who are in need of blood get the most appropriate blood component based upon their HLA report, their potential bone marrow donor’s HLA report and that of the donor’s whose blood is available from the program.
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In the rare event that the blood unit collected for the specific set of patients is not utilised for them within 3 weeks, the unit is utilised for other patients.
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The patient receives your red blood cells free of cost under this program while the platelets are contributed towards the patients undergoing transplants. Plasma is sent for separation to make life saving drugs. All components of your donated blood are utilised.
By joining this elite group of blood donors you will be able to help cure a child and rescue him/her and the family the suffering associated with blood transfusions for a lifetime.
Register Here
Please call 9480044444 and ask for more details.
It's the coming together of Cure2Childred Foundation - Italy, DKMS - Germany, Rashtrotthana Blood Bank - Bangalore and Sankalp India Foundation which has made this program possible. We would like to acknowledge and thank all the partners, the little ones and their families who are going to participate and the blood donors for making this endevour possible!