Donation for life

A system of organised blood and organ donations should be created in line with medical morality for better healthcare

Once every other year or so I write something about transplantation and organ donation. So it will be today. However, in the context of organ donation, I want to include the one type of donation that is extremely important but is rarely emphasised. That is blood donation. One of the great discoveries from more than a century ago was that of blood groups. This led to the development of blood transfusion as a lifesaving method in all sorts of situations.

Major surgery, management of trauma, blood loss during delivery of children, blood replacement in blood diseases were all made possible by the discovery of blood groups and cross matching of blood to prevent ‘transfusion reactions’ which are really nothing but a ‘foreign organ rejection’. Why is all this worth talking about? Simply because blood has to come from a human being and has to be ‘donated’ like any other organ. And even today proper collection, testing, storage and provision of blood donated by volunteer donors are virtually nonexistent in Pakistan.

Almost half a century ago as medical students in King Edward Medical College (KEMC), some of us got together and formed a medical student and young doctor based volunteer blood donor organisation called ‘Anjuman-e-hayat-nau’ that provided blood for patients requiring urgent surgery. The organisation was started by a very dedicated senior medical student named Iqbal Ayub Lodhi who had become junior to us academically because of ‘rustication’ for a number of years after participating in the student strikes in the early sixties. Sadly Lodhi passed away at a relatively young age after graduation.

Most of the blood for surgical patients was and probably still is provided by ‘professional’ blood donors that in those days used to aggregate under a big tree in the lawn across from the Mayo Hospital blood bank. Most of these donors were drug addicts and in the evenings the smell of ‘charas’ (hashish) was quite obvious from that area. The problem was that most families were reluctant to donate blood even for their close relatives so the only source of blood was from these professional donors.

Of course even as medical students fifty years ago we knew that the blood donated by drug addicts could be dangerous to the patient who received it. As a house surgeon in cardiac surgery at that time, I do remember that virtually every patient that received a blood transfusion would get a fever after receiving the blood. I don’t know how much of the present epidemic of Hepatitis B and C in Pakistan is from blood transfusions from these professional blood donors when they switched to injectable drugs a few decades later.

During my time on the faculty of KE a few years ago I found out that students and the young doctors were still donating blood for poor patients in Mayo and affiliated hospitals. But I don’t know if there is a regular organisation that exists to regulate this activity.