India is striving to achieve the target of 100% voluntary blood donation by 2020. National Blood Transfusion Council, National AIDS Control Organisation, Federation of Indian Blood Donation Organisations and all other stakeholders agree to the goal. The primary focus appears to increase voluntary blood donation to meet the ever growing demand for blood in the country. Is increasing supply to meet the demand the only way?
With the support of DKMS Germany and Cure2Children, Italy, Sankalp India Foundation has been offering free HLA typing to patients from all over the country. Several of these patients find a match within their families. Once the match is found, starts the journey of screening and preparation for the transplantation.
Rupavathi is a little more than five years old. She lived with her family in a small village near Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu. Her father worked as a coolie who helped in mason work locally. Her mother was a house wife. Rupavathi was diagnosed with thalassemia when she was one year old.
The local doctor referred her to the Indira Gandhi Institute of Child Health in Bengaluru. Starting from 2011, Rupavathi was continuously receiving blood transfusion there for free. "The doctors there were nice. Sankalp volunteers helped me a lot.
At the time of patient enrollment, we doctors collect history and the diagnosis report to confirm haemoglobinpathy. But few of them would have misplaced the report or would not have collected their reports from the previous hospitals which they had visited. Under these circumstances, what are the next steps? Dr. Reshma Srinivas shares her experience with patients at Samraksha, and explores more on this topic.What is haemoglobinopathy?
Haemoglobinopathies are diverse group of inherited blood disorders that result from variations in structure or synthesis of haemoglobin.
By timely intervention we may save a lot of complications and transfusions.
In our blood donation drives these days we have begun to capture details of deferrals to analyze and assess the reasons in greater detail. But even before that there's one trend that is pretty obvious and quite disturbing. A huge percentage of women donors are unfortunately anemic leading to them being turned down.
