CHENNAI: An overnight train journey from Bengaluru by 34-year-old finance professional Aditya Hegde helped a 21-year-old woman in a Chennai hospital give safe birth to a baby girl on Tuesday.
Aditya Hegde was born with a very rare blood group, HH negative, which is found in one in 10,000 Indians.
With a blood group so rare, Aditya has selflessly given his blood to those in need of it—55 times in the past 17 years!
The Kottayam couple found out that Agnus had the rare blood group only when she was admitted for delivery.
It is estimated that only 4 per million people have it in the world.
BENGALURU: Two units of the rare Bombay Blood Group, stored in a Davanagere blood bank, has traveled miles to Myanmar via a courier and saved the life of a 34-year-old woman who underwent a heart surgery.
One would often wonder how Sankalp’s emergency team manages to handle a multitude of request of Bombay blood group day after day.
Just within June the organisation got 19 blood requests for Bombay group patients. These were requests for 34 units of blood with 26 requests indicating the need for immediate transfusion.
It's always a challenge to make available adequate quantity of rare blood groups. Whenever there is request for Bombay blood group, our emergency team explores all alternatives to blood transfusion before proceeding to organise for blood donations. The medical condition, the alternatives for transfusions which fit into the scenario and whether or not any alternative was used eventually is documented for each request. We recently analysed 40 of the Bombay blood group requests the organisation received last year.
Sankalp India Foundation has an Emergency Team which works to ensure that people who do not find blood from the blood banks are helped. The team works on corner cases of blood transfusion medicine and extremely rare blood group requests. The team has been handling BBG requests for last 6 years.
In a country of a billion, only a few hundred people have the Bombay blood group. Here is how they band together in times of need
