Severe anaemia in a young man due to frequent blood donation for sale/money: A common occurrence locally in most privately owned laboratories

Mabiaku TO 1, *, Mabiaku YO 2, Yovwin DG 1 and Anyanwu EB 1

1 Department of Family Medicine, Delta State University Teaching Hospital, P.M.B. 07, Oghara, Nigeria.
2 Department of Surgery, Delta State University Teaching Hospital, P.M.B. 07, Oghara, Nigeria.
 
Review
International Journal of Biological and Pharmaceutical Sciences Archive, 2022, 04(01), 018–020.
Article DOI: 10.53771/ijbpsa.2022.4.1.0043
Publication history: 
Received on 14 March 2022; revised on 26 April 2022; accepted on 28 April 2022
 
Abstract: 
Blood donation is globally encouraged from the public for the use of ill patients who might need blood transfusion. Many laboratories do urge people to donate blood willingly. The donors are usually checked properly and are screened for some notable blood borne diseases and the blood level of these potential donors is checked to ensure that the donor is capable of donating blood. For regular donors, the last dates that they donated are checked just to be sure that the interval is not too close. But what happens when the donor is a “commercial donor” who donates blood for monetary gains and usually gets the protocol broken for him. The planned periodic interval between donations is usually not followed and he is allowed to donate. He is paid off, and the blood bank then sells these blood for monetary gains. He goes from one laboratory to another and is allowed to donate blood for money. This went on until one day he presented to a hospital with a complain of a tingling/ ringing sensation in his head and laboratory findings revealed that he was Anaemic apparently from the unsupervised frequent blood donations. And only then did he tell his story.
 
Keywords: 
Blood Donations; Anaemia; Blood for money; Laboratories
 
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