For 12-year-old Hamza Shabir, a new project to change Pakistan’s unregulated blood transfusion system could be life-changing.
The boy from the eastern city of Lahore is among an estimated 100,000 Pakistani children who suffer from thalassaemia, a genetic blood disorder that can cause anaemia or death if not treated.
Hamza was diagnosed with thalassaemia soon after he was born and receives new blood every two weeks at Sundas Foundation, a Lahore charity.
Not all Pakistani children who suffer from thalassaemia are as fortunate as Hamza.
“At least half of them don’t get any support,” said Dr Hasan Zaheer, head of the country’s blood transfusion programme.
Zaheer is leading efforts to fix Pakistan’s blood transfusion system for the remaining 50,000 children who suffer from thalassaemia and are without support.
The project funded by
Germany’s KfW Bank.
“A fragmented, unregulated system is at the heart of these problems,” Zaheer said, explaining how the decentralised transfusion programme has been riddled with discrepancies.
Transfusion centres in the past operated largely according to their own practices, without following safety regulations, Zaheer added.
There was no proper system in place to collect blood from donors, to store it, and to transmit it to other patients, he said.
“The entire vein-to-vein chain was unsafe,” the doctor said. “It put a large number of lives at risk.”
In 2014, the government formulated a policy to centralise the system, linking more than a dozen large blood centres across the country.
Germany’s KfW Bank is providing 25mn euros ($28mn) for the project, which has been run by the Pakistani government since 2010.
The project is funding 13 modern centres with state-of-the-art collection and storage facilities, said Dr Masuma Zaidi, head of the project at KfW’s Pakistan office.
It also aims to upgrade existing blood banks at 60 state and private hospitals, Zaidi added.
At least three centres are already operational in the north and north-west and the rest are being built, she said.
The plan’s most important aspect, Zaheer said, is to establish screening facilities at the new centres to ensure that infected blood is neither donated nor transmitted.
“The most worrying thing under the old system was that a majority of centres were using substandard equipment and techniques for screening,” he said. “This factor is being addressed.”
Zaheer said unsafe methods for blood screening helped cause the massive spread of HIV, Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.
The health ministry does not have figures, but officials say several thousand people were infected by unsafe blood during that period.
Hamza in Lahore remains hopeful that his life will be easier once the project is completed.
“Sometimes my parents and the charity that helps me face problems, and if I get blood late, it is painful,” he said. “I’ve been told that this project will make things easier for me and kids like me.”
Zaheer said that the long-term benefits of the project will depend on whether Pakistan can keep it running after the German donors end their funding following the end of the second phase, which is expected to be at the end of this year.
Pakistan’s government needs to make “a long-term commitment and investment,” Zaheer said.
