What comes to your mind when you hear of blood donation, especially as a Nigerian? Overtime, the blood donation conversation has not really been in the positive.
Before we move to the real conversation of blood donation, let me give you a few details about why June 14th every year is celebrated as world blood donor day.
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian Biologist and Physician whose discovery of the ABO blood group system has revolutionised the science of blood donation and transfusion medicine.
The World Health Assembly had decided for June 14th, being the birthday of Karl Landsteiner to be celebrated world over as World Blood Donor’s Day.
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This decision was initially implemented in the year 2004 and it was specifically aimed at creating awareness about voluntary blood donation to save lives and a day set aside to celebrate and acknowledge donors for the invaluable jobs they do to save lives.
We are well aware that some of you our most cherished readers may be wondering why voluntary blood donation is a big deal.
You would understand better how much of a big deal it is if you have a sickle cell anaemic patient, a pregnant woman who would deliver by caesarean session, cancer or other anaemic inducing ailments in your space.
Whenever an invasive surgical procedure is being carried out manually as it is the norm in third world countries, the Anaesthesiologist always instruct that a specific number of blood pints is made available before the procedure commences, depending on the outcome of the clotting profile assay and that of the packed cell volume.
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For anyone reading through this article, it is a punishable offence for you to have read to this stage of this article without being able to speak with certainty, to what your blood group and genotype is.
Voluntary blood donation is a form of community service that we advocate for so passionately and the reasons are not far-fetched.
For anyone to have undergone pre donation screening and certified fit to donate blood for a patient, it means that such a patient has kept him or herself so safe over the years, to the point of sharing his unit of life with someone else without putting the blood recipient in any form of danger.
While there are citizens based in Nigeria who are routinely disposed to voluntary blood donation for the use of patients, some other would have been voluntary donors are always skeptical of what their voluntarily donated blood maybe used for at the end of the day.
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Let us talk a bit about blood touting. While the term blood touts or commercial blood donors, may not sound so wonderful, we must admit that majority of the blood needs of the Nigerian State are served by these blood touts.
The inability of the voluntary blood donors to meet the demands of these hospitals is what gives the blood touts the market which they serve.
No Nigerian hospital sells blood to patients, rather the fees that you are asked to pay for at blood banks are precisely for the blood bags, blood giving sets, the screening carried out on the pints of blood that is issued to you, power used to store the blood and then finally for the facility (refrigeration services) in which the blood is stored.
The maximum shelf life of most blood pints in Nigerian blood bank facilities is 35 days.
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What leads to the recruiting of blood touts in the first place, someone may be tempted to ask.
It is no longer news that the global best practise with respect to blood donation services, is voluntary blood donation. This voluntary blood donation practise has been established to pose the least risk to the recipient.
You may wonder why a patient relative would overlook a voluntary blood donor to seek out a blood tout, with its attendant risks for their services?
The simple answer to the above question is that you do not get voluntary blood donors at all times unlike the commercial blood donors who would be at your service once you can afford their service fee.
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For each blood pint loaned out to a patient, you are expected to replace such units of blood for the blood bank at the end of the procedure for which the loaned blood pint was used.
A situation where you are not able to provide qualified donors to replace such pints used for you, is where the commercial blood donors are recruited and paid to offer such services.
While voluntary blood donors remain the best sources of blood for patients, these classes of donors are always in very limited supply and as such never meets the demand for blood in our hospitals, clinics and maternities.
The gap in the supply of blood for the use of these patients is what the blood touts are paid to make up for.
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Who is a blood tout?
A blood tout can loosely be described as a man or woman who are often teenagers who donate blood for patients exclusively for the purpose of the remuneration they are offered for such services.
Blood touts in most cases live a careless form of life wherein they care the least about their lifestyles which poses a great risk to the recipients of the blood.
Most of these blood touts overtime have been established to have very rough lifestyles wherein they abuse drugs, share needles and other sharp objects, indulge routinely in unprotected sex with multiple sexual partners and so many other vices which predisposes the recipient of the blood to all forms of health risks once transfused with such blood.
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While a voluntary blood donor is deliberate with his lifestyle and would only stick to the international best practises with respect to blood donation protocols, the blood tout is overly obsessed with the amount of money they make from such blood donation transactions and as such, care the least about their personal safety and that of their recipients in their quest for money.
Owing to the fact that the packed cell volume (PCV) of blood donors is compulsorily checked before blood donation, these commercial donors often implore the use of hematinic concentrates to give a false elevated PCV values.
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There have been cases where blood touts became severely anemic after donating for financial rewards that they had to be transfused with their own blood so as not to have a crisis.
While it is easy to blame the blood touts, we must also acknowledge that in a country where poverty and hunger seems to be mutating geometrically into forms which are not known to the citizens, doing anything for survival becomes an option.
One of the ways to protect your patient from being exposed to blood touts is to donate for such family relative by yourself.
To a healthy male, who is being attended to by skilled professionals at the blood bank, once your pre donation screening is successful, donating blood for your family relatives should be a badge of honor.
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When the demand for blood for such patient relative of yours overwhelms your ability to supply as a relative, you can ask for the assistance of nuclear family members, family friends and other relatives who are compactible to donate before exploring the option of commercial donors.
The second other way to be sure of the quality of blood which is transfused into a patient is to be sure that the pre donation screening process at the blood bank makes use of the relatively best technologies to screen this blood of known blood borne infections.
More so there is so much to be said about blood donation but I would have to finish up the conversation in another article which you can access on this link.
HAPPY WORLD BLOOD DONOR’S DAY. ENDEAVOUR TO SAVE A LIFE BY DOING DIRECTED BLOOD DONATION.
5 responses to “CELEBRATING WORLD BLOOD DONOR’S DAY IN NIGERIA.”
I’ve had one experience where a commercial donor was rushed to my facility and before information could be gotten the man gave up. We were later able to extract info from those that brought him. We found out that they supposedly did his hb estimation and it was high and they proceeded to collect 3units from him and he went into anaemic shock and because it’s a phc facility with no qualified personnel they proceeded to rush the man to our facility without thinking of transfusing the units of blood collected. I just wish there’s a way this commercial donors can be regulated. Thanks for the write up.
Thank you so much for this quality engagement. This is most appreciated, and I hope that our audience would learn from this and advise the youths in their space appropriately.
Thank you for sharing this insightful information.
Thank you so much for appreciating the little work we are doing.
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