The newly established National Blood Service Commission has vowed to reduce the level of maternal mortality where 15 percent of every 1,000 women die due to blood loss during childbirth.
Director-General of the Commission, Omale Joseph, stated this while briefing journalists on the sidelines of the presidential assent to the bill establishing the agency from the hitherto National Blood Transfusion Service, a unit under the Department of Hospital Services in the Federal Ministry of Health.
He said the Commission was putting a mechanism in place to check sharp practices by hospitals in the use of blood for patients, adding that through its One Million Safe Blood Initiative, it was expected that safe blood will be accessible to Nigerians in the six geopolitical zones of the country at any point in time.
The DG, while responding to questions on the need to sanitise blood handling, utilisation and administration in Nigeria, said many blood administering officials in hospitals cut corners by administering expired blood, saying that safe blood has a lifespan of 35 days after which it becomes unsafe.
According to him, Nigerians have developed the habit of commercialising blood, as individuals donate blood for fees ranging between N20,000 and above, a practice he said the commission will strive to discourage, as blood is not a commercial commodity.
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“Another area the Act would help is the issue of increasing the outlets where people can get blood. For example, you rarely get blood banks outside major hospitals. Most of the states are only making do with only one or two blood banks.
“The establishment of the Commission would ensure that not only state governments and their big tertiary hospitals would have blood banks, but every local government should have at least a blood bank so that people in need would be able to access it easily and cheaply.
“Blood donation is necessary to keep one healthy. Once you donate blood, new cells come up to replenish the one you’ve donated, because blood produced by the body expires over time and is reabsorbed by the body. But when removed from the body through donation, it gives room for new blood cells which makes the donor more healthy”, he added.
On his part, sponsor of the Bill for an Act establishing the Commission, Abbas Tajudeen (APC, Kaduna) described President Muhammadu Buhari’s assent to the legislation as a very important milestone in the health sector as blood transfusion before now had been largely unregulated, with a lot of sharp practices involved.
“Before the assent of the president, the industry had been fragmented. It had been to a great extent, unregulated and not too coordinated and because of that a lot of things are happening.
“Some of them was that the blood sold are not of the right quality and the recipient of some bloods instead of getting cured for what they were given would end up having some other kind of diseases.
“There was a baseline survey that was done in 2015 which revealed that the total requirement of Nigeria on blood is about 1.5 million pints. Based on the research it was established that 0.5 million pints was achieved at the end of each year and that translates to just one-third of our total requirements”, the lawmaker said.
