has forced blood banks or transfusion services to rely heavily on the family replacement system, a development which has fueled resort to black markets by people in desperate need of transfusion.
Also, the National Blood Service Commission noted that Nigeria gets only 27 per cent of its yearly blood need from voluntary donors, leaving a shortfall of about 73.3 per cent every year. He confirmed that he and other accomplices had been running the business for some time. He even put a call to the network of donors, who, in turn, confirmed their availability to sell to the ‘willing’ reporter.
He explained: “We have voluntary blood donors, family replacement blood donors, and commercial blood donors. This last group that I mentioned is actually very dangerous to the society because some of them have the misconception that some hard drugs can boost their blood level, and so they take hard drugs. Some of them also patronise commercial sex workers and would not readily disclose this during counselling because they want to be certified as eligible to donate blood.
Yuguda lamented that blood is currently a scarce commodity. He explained that a wide gap exists between demand and supply for blood in the country, with the majority of blood donations coming from family replacement. Highlighting the benefits of voluntary blood donation, the professor mentioned free medical check-ups, which include lifestyle counselling as well as blood screening for hepatitis, HIV. He said these help regular voluntary donors maintain a healthy lifestyle because they would pay more attention to what they do, to be able to donate blood every three months.
Reeling out statistics, Adeyemo noted: “In Nigeria, where we have an estimated 220 million persons, we expect that about 2.2 million people are donating blood yearly in the country. But that is not so. Currently, from available data, only about 25 per cent of our blood needs are collected. So, there is a deficit of about 75 per cent of the requirements that we are not meeting.
Meanwhile, speaking on this year’s WBDD theme, Adeyemo expressed gratitude to voluntary donors, saying: “All they are focused on is saving lives, and I must say I am happy to say that that has not changed. People who have been voluntarily donating blood to us have continued to voluntarily donate blood to us, irrespective of the hardship.