Rare Blood Groups’ Donorbase

Source: Hindustan Times, Apr 2008

Taking a cue from Nagpur-based couple Khushroo and Fermin Paocha who compiled an SMS-enabled database of voluntary blood-donors across India, Delhi-based couple Rahul and Tulika Verma have started a website for maintaining a record of people with rare blood groups.

The idea behind www.rarebloodgroups.org is to maintain an up-to-date register of donors with rare blood types so that a patient in need can quickly be transfused with the required blood.  According to Delhi government’s blood banks, there are only one or two units of rare blood as compared to the more common B+ for which there are close to 900 units available.

Read more and access the donorbase, here…

25% of India’s Transplants in Chennai

Source: Times of India, Apr 2008

Long years of struggle convincing relatives of brain-dead patients to give their consent for organ donation appears to be paying off, with the number of organ donors going up in the last couple of years.

“The number of donors has gone up from one to three per month. We have recorded more than six multi-organ donations in the last couple of months. This signifies a great improvement in public awareness about organ donation,” said urologist and MOHAN Foundation managing trustee Dr Sunil Shroff, who has been campaigning for cadaver transplants.

At least one fourth of the multi-organ transplants in the country happen in Chennai.

Chennai police record at least 20 accidents a day. “Even if we assume that only 10% of them are brain dead, we will have two donors a day. From every patient we can harvest two kidneys, two lungs, a liver and a heart thus helping six patients,” says Dr Shroff…

Read the full story, here…

Need blood? Just SMS

Source: Hindustan Times, April 2008

The SMS code 5676775 could save your loved ones’ life.  If you have an urgent requirement for blood, just send a text message to this number, and the contact details of donors of the blood group you require will be messaged back to you in a few minutes.

The SMS service accesses a database of 45,000 donors across the country, listed on www.indianblooddonors.com, and is the brainchild of railway superintendent Khushroo Poacha who set it up with the help of his wife Fermin, eight years ago.

P.S. Even though this information is not strictly a part of “organ donation”, in the spirit of the “Give a Little project, the editor of this website assessed it as important and relevant enough to share it with readers of this website.