27th September, 2013
A nephrologist at St. Nicholas Hospital, Lagos, southern Nigeria, Dr Ebun Bamgboye, said on Friday that regular blood donation could make people live in good health and look younger.
Bamgboye told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos, that rather than having side effects, regular blood donation could prevent haemochromatosis, a genetic disorder associated with iron overload in the body.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia, says, “In medicine, iron overload indicates accumulation of iron in the body from any cause.
“The most important causes are hereditary haemochromatosis (HHC), a genetic disorder, and transfusion iron overload, which can result from repeated blood transfusion.”
Bamgboye said:“If you donate a pint of blood, in few hours, you will replace the volume that you have lost.
“Within about two weeks you would have actually replaced the actual red blood cells that you donated.
“So, you don’t lose anything. It is completely replaceable; you can replace it within a very short period of time.
“If you make reference to the recent event in Kenya where we had a terrorist attack, a lot of blood was required for many casualties.
“If blood was available in the blood bank, there wouldn’t be the need to start running around asking for donors to come and donate blood.”
According to him, `sometimes you need that blood in an emergency and in some instances you have people that have rare blood groups and people will come and donate.
“If people have preemptively donated blood, you can be sure that if you yourself requires blood that gives you an advantage over any other person.
“If you get to a hospital and you are actually a registered regular blood donor, whatever blood is available will probably be given to you as a priority.”