NPR: Hospitals Around The World Have A Dire Shortage Of Blood
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This post first appeared on NPR.
When Claude Tayou Tagny was a young medical student on a rotation through clinics in rural Cameroon, he treated a woman during a difficult childbirth. She had lost, by his estimate, at least three pints of blood, triple the normal amount for childbirth and equal to roughly 30% of her total blood volume.
Tagny, with no supply of blood on hand, did the only thing he could: put out a call to the woman's family for emergency donations. He was only able to raise one pint.
"It was not enough," he says. The baby survived, but the woman did not.
It wasn't the last time Tagny, now a hematologist at the University of Yaounde Teaching Hospital, would confront a similar crisis. He says that a family's frantic rush to collect blood — critical for treating everything from traumatic injuries and malaria-caused anemia to sickle cell disease and cancer — are part of the hospital's daily rhythm. And there's never enough.
"That is what we are facing every day," he says. "People dying because they don't have blood available in the hospitals."