TRANSFUSION of blood helps save millions of lives every year. It can help patients suffering from life-threatening conditions live longer and with a higher quality of life and can support complex medical and surgical procedures. Sensing the necessity, some fraudulent businessmen are running blood banks and transfusion centres in the capital and elsewhere in the country without meeting safety standards, putting the lives of thousands at risk. A news carried by a vernacular national daily reported that some licensed or undocumented privately owned clinics collect blood from people, including drug addicts, without testing the donors’ blood for diseases and they even mix liquid saline with blood to make more profit.
According to licensing rules, an authorised blood bank must recruit doctors, nurses and technicians to test five diseases — AIDS, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, syphilis and malaria — in the blood of a donor. Most of these centres do not recruit physicians and nurses. Instead, their job is done by someone at the office. Later, these firms sell the blood to some people who would buy it for their sick family members. Drug addicts sell contaminated blood in exchange of Tk 200 to Tk 700 but the owners of the centres sell the blood to the patients’ at Tk 1500 to Tk 2500 per bag. Experts said that transfer of blood in such a way is very risky and those who run such businesses should be called killers.
A total of 94 licensed private blood banks and transfusion centres are now operating across the country. The legal or illegal blood banks were established nearby the government hospitals in the city’s Bakshibazar, Green Road, Mohakhali, College Gate, and Jatrabari areas. Brokers of the blood banks collect buyers from different large hospitals and sell off the unexamined blood that could endanger the life of the patients who are already under threat. Mobile Court of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB) occasionally raids blood banks and award imprisonment when irregularities are found. It is the responsibility of Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) to monitor blood banks but their callousness takes a toll in terms of patients’ lives. Law enforcers had sealed 28 such blood banks and transfusion centres and awarded 54 people imprisonment mostly in the capital in the last five years. But that failed to stop this unethical business.
Blood, synonymous with life, must be collected following the Safe Blood Transfusion Act, 2002 and the guideline of World Health Organization. In order to create timely blood security, the government should undertake encouragement programmes across the country for voluntary blood donation to save mankind as a scarcity of good blood may cost people their lives. And the government must bring the licensed blood banks under regulation and the undocumented firms must be precipitously sealed.
