Man ‘selling harmful blood’ arrested

Police say suspect was arrested earlier as well on same charges

KURIANWALA:

Staff of the Allied Hospital caught a man who had been allegedly selling contaminated blood.

The suspect was handed over to the Civil Lines Police.

In the complaint lodged with the Civil Lines Police by Asif Nadeem, a resident of Toba Tek Singh, said that his wife had been in labour, and her condition was serious.

He said that the doctors had asked him to arrange a bag of A negative blood.

Asif Nadeem said that he went outside the main gate of the hospital in search of blood in a state of panic.

He said that he bumped into a man, Agha, who introduced himself as a laboratory employee and told him that he could arrange a bag of A negative blood.

The complainant alleged that Agha took Rs4,500 from him near the Emergency Department of the hospital.

Agha allegedly gave him a bag of “unusable blood”.

The doctor returned the blood bag to the complainant telling him that it was harmful to health.

Mohammad Hayat and Zaid Ahmed, in charge of the checkpoint at the Allied Hospital, grabbed the suspect and handed him over to the Civil Lines Police Station.

After registering a case against the suspect, the Civil Lines Police sent him behind bars.

Police said the suspect had been arrested earlier as well for allegedly selling blood bags to people at the Allied Hospital.

A report published on these pages some years ago, while quoting an official of the National Blood Transfusion Programme, said that the use of substandard screening equipment to detect various infections before transfusing blood was causing various infections among patients in the country.

Cheap and substandard kits used for screening blood were mostly unregulated.

Blood transfusions are more common than heart surgery. Around 1,830 public and private blood banks operated in the country, and manual kits are widely used.

Unsafe blood transfusion got attention after two children had contracted HIV after receiving blood transfusions several years ago.

The victims were siblings from Bhara Kahu, who suffered from a rare congenital platelet disorder.

They had received more than 1,700 transfusions in routine and emergency situations spanning a few years. Their father had said most of the transfusions had taken place at a particular hospital’s blood bank, and suspected that blood at the hospital might have been tainted.

The hospital officials, however, said the children had received platelets, plasma and red cell transfusions from many other private and public sector blood banks in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, and other cities of Punjab.

It was likely that they got the infection from a transfusion from a substandard blood bank in one or the other city of the province, they said, while referencing the more reliable blood screening techniques used in most of the facilities in Islamabad.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 18^th, 2023.