World Blood Donor Day is being observed in countries around the world including Pakistan to raise awareness about the need for safe blood and thank blood donors for saving lives.
The day is also created to support national blood transfusion services, blood donor organizations, and non-governmental organizations in strengthening and expanding voluntary blood donor programmes.
World Blood Donor Day theme for the year 2022 is “Donating blood is an act of solidarity. Join the effort and save lives” in order to draw attention to the roles that voluntary blood donations play in saving lives and enhancing solidarity within communities.
In a message on the occasion, President Dr Arif Alvi said World Blood Donor Day serves to raise awareness of the need to make voluntary donations and to thank voluntary, unpaid blood donors for their life-saving donations.
“Blood donation is indeed an act of solidarity as it is needed to save the life of women with complications during pregnancy and childbirth, children with severe anaemia, often resulting from malaria or malnutrition, accident victims and surgical and cancer patients,” the president said.
“On this day we celebrate the enormous contributions of blood donors around the world and appreciate those who have donated blood in the past and pledge to continue doing so in the future,” he added.
He said regular blood donation by a number of healthy people was needed to ensure that blood will always be available whenever and wherever it is needed.
“A healthy person may donate blood several times of year without any adverse effect on his health with a minimum interval of 12 weeks between two donations whereas the platelet donors may donate more frequently up to 24 times per year,” the president added.
The president mentioned that according to the World Health Organization (WHO), since 2016 over 2.5 billion people worldwide were in need of blood and blood products. “Therefore, we need to continue finding new blood donors and encourage those who are already giving blood to do so more frequently,” he stressed.
He said in Pakistan, an awareness campaign is even more essential as the rate of blood donation in Pakistan is very low compared to the rest of the world. In Pakistan over 90 percent of total blood transfused is donated by the friends and relatives of patients while the remaining 10% is donated by professional donors.
He said there is a need to create awareness on all platforms of conventional and social media about voluntary blood donation to dispel misconceptions and for creating the necessary infrastructure for making donations, screening the donated blood and preservation on internationally accepted standards and norms.
He called upon all healthy adult men and women of Pakistan to donate blood as frequently as possible as an act of piety to save lives and give relief and happiness to the recipients and their family members.
World Blood Donor Day was established in 2004 by the World Health Organization (WHO) to bring awareness to the ongoing need for blood donations to save lives. June 14 also marks the birth anniversary of Karl Landsteiner who won the Nobel prize for Medicine in 1930 for his work in classifying blood types.
It was his work that revolutionized blood transfusions and led to the practice of transfusing blood between people with compatible blood types.
