AIZAWL, April 26 � The Association for Voluntary Blood Donation (AVBD) has strongly appealed to the individuals, voluntary organisations and civil bodies to donate more blood in order to overcome the prevailing blood deficiency in the state.
The AVBD has since long been taking earnest effort for more blood donation in Mizoram with an aim to achieve 100% voluntary donation in the Christian state. The association has expressed happiness at the success of its measures to increase blood donation in the state and lauded media and cable television for propagating and publicising AVBP steps and blood donation related news.
AVBD said that the state of Mizoram has considerably improved in voluntary blood donation achieving 97% during the previous years. However, voluntary donation has exceedingly reduced during 2014-15 with only 76.49%. Among several reasons, the main reason behind decrease in voluntary blood donation was insufficiency of blood bag in many blood banks for five months recently. While appealing to donate more blood, the AVBD said the imposition of blood processing fee by the state government should not upset one from donating blood. �Whether imposing processing fee or not, one should keep in one�s mind that the volume of blood required by a patient remain the same and that deficiency of blood can cause death�, the AVBD said in a statement.
AVBD said that while it is mandatory to pay blood processing fee, in many government hospitals blood bags were freely given to patients. Especially in Aizawl Civil Hospital 50% of blood given to patients are given free of cost. BPL patients and patients registered under RSBY do not generally pay blood processing fee and the same is not charged on critical patients who need regular blood transfusion, AVBD said in a statement.
