How many times have we seen in our Tamil movies that when a main character in a critical situation and is in need of blood?
The doctor tells, "Sorry, we need AB-ve blood group. It's very rare. If we don't provide him the blood in 2 hours, he will die!"
And then, the hero, true to his character, offers to give his blood to the patient, because, miraculously, he just realized he has the same blood group!!
But, the problem is, it is not so simple. Even if your hero has just jumped out of heaven,his blood needs to be tested and found to be of the same blood group as what he claims. Also, his blood needs to be tested for 8 infections such as HIV, Hepatitis, etc which can be transmitted by blood transfusion. This is Indian Law; no one can refute it, not even our hero! :P
The thing is, these tests take time to show results. At least 15 hours are needed to obtain the test results. So, if you urgently need blood, our hero, though willing, would have to rush to a near by blood bank to purchase blood. And, if blood for that group is not available there? OOPS! That's a tricky question.
The hospital authorities would have to choose between the patient suffering from lack of blood and risk facing the patient's death or to let the patient receive untested blood from someone whose blood group matches with the patients'.
It would be against the law to transfuse untested blood onto patients. Hence, no hospital does that. As a result, though, precious lives are lost.
The problem with the lack of availability of blood is a shameful reflection of the inherent baseless fears and conservativeness of the people of our country. If every eligible, healthy Indian citizen can give one unit of blood, the amount of blood collected would surpass the demand by a huge margin. Yet, we don't do that.
The dream of every blood bank is to have sufficient amount of blood in their storage so that they would never have to turn down a request for blood. Our project was born as an attempt to realize that dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment