Time and again, Ukrainian doctors and non-governmental organizations are raising the alarm: the nation experiences extreme lack of blood. “The situation with the donor blood is a critical one; Kyiv had 36,000 donors on list last year, while the city needed at least 80,000 of them. Overall, 20,000 people have donated their blood this year already, but it is still too little, as the blood bank gets daily calls for blood products from more than 60 medical institutions of the city. Where should we get it, if we have only two or three donors coming here per day, instead of 100 people, and on some days, nobody comes at all?” director of procurement bureau of the Kyiv City Blood Bank Tetiana Liashenko says. The situation is critical in Kyiv as well as in Ukraine in general.
Cancer patients’ need for blood transfusions is especially pressing. Ukraine registers 450 new cancer cases and 250 deaths from cancer daily. A third to a quarter of men and a fifth of women develop cancer sometime during their lives. Reported cancer morbidity and mortality are constantly growing over the past 20 years. Mortality has been reduced slightly only for lung and stomach cancers. Treatments for malignant neoplasms include a toxic one, that is, chemotherapy. A person undergoing chemotherapy is in need of donor blood. In fact, doctors say that “we observe an indissoluble link between the effectiveness of the treatment and the availability of blood.” It is due to the fact that chemotherapy, while killing malignant cells, damages the patient’s bone marrow, too, which means that the patient suffers from disrupted production of all kinds of blood cells, including red blood cells, platelets and leukocytes. These cells can be restored only through donor blood transfusions. On the whole blood transfusions are extremely rare, the patient usually gets transfusion of plasma, red blood cells mass, or platelet concentrate, depending on the specific needs of the person in question.
First-class transfusionist Larysa Vakhnenko says: “The word ‘donation’ comes from the word ‘to give’ which sounds donare in Latin; it is a voluntary donation of the person’s own blood or its components for subsequent transfusion to the patients in need of it. The WHO data show that Ukraine needs 12 to 15 ml of blood per capita, but we get only 8 to 8.5 ml.”
Doctors and healthcare experts alike are concerned with the reluctance of our citizens to become donors. It is not enough to mention this urgent problem only on the World Blood Donor Day that is celebrated on June 14. Non-governmental Ukrainian Health Organization, which takes an active part in promoting healthy lifestyles and providing financial support for medical institutions, recently organized a campaign to attract volunteers to donate blood, as a part of LG Electronics’ social project “A drop of blood saves a human life” and with support of Kyiv Regional Blood Bank. The campaign is credited with attracting 86 people to become donors and procuring about 41 liters of blood in the process. The organizers plan to conduct such campaigns more often in the future. NGOs should join their efforts, work more actively with the public and help the government to deal with such challenges.
