Autologous in Singapore

Despite many people assuring me the opposite is true, you cannot store your own blood in Singapore. They will only do autologous transfusion for a designated surgery.

Long ago I studied the prevalence of O Negative blood in Singapore. Many of the links there are now dead but the bottom line is, there are not a lot of people with O negative in Singapore.

Plus given that they will now not accept donations from anyone who has lived in the UK (which includes me) due to the theoretical risk of mad cow, the pool of potential donors has shrunk considerably since my survey. The risk of getting mad cow disease from this pool of donors is so theoretical that it seems foolish to block yourself off from such a rare blood type.

The doctor I spoke to at the Blood Transfusion Center (ph: 6213-0626) said there was plenty of O negative blood in supply. There's a total of 30 pints of fresh O-ve for the entire country of 4.3m people.

That struck me as shockingly poor. He didn't know how much frozen blood there was in supply but he said that was more than ample. Given that there is a fairly big dengue epidemic right now (which can lead to hemorrhaging) I'm not very happy.

"You can freeze blood for up to 10 years."

Perhaps... but I wonder what that 9 and 10 year old stuff tastes like...

Time to invest in a major supply of DEET.

Labels: singapore