Can You Die Because Of Blood Transfusion?
And how media got science reporting wrong again
You might have heard about the unfortunate event about how a patient died in a hospital because he was transfused the wrong type of blood. It was an unfortunate event, which could have been prevented. And as many other medically related issues there was lot of fuzz going on about this.
Transfusing the wrong blood group is a very dangerous thing to do as it can lead to a nasty reaction within the body of the person who is taking the incorrect blood group which we call ‘a hemolytic reaction’.
A hemolytic reaction is a nasty reaction because of our immune system (the system that keeps the body safe from foreign things) and it can eventually kill the person. If you have taken blood in your life, this is the reason why doctors tell you to inform them if you feel any discomfort while transfusing is going on.
The more incorrect blood transfused the deadlier the hemolytic reaction can get. So stopping the quickly transfusion is important.
Crossmatching the blood
Before the blood is transfused the donor blood goes through a process called cross matching, this cross matching is the test that tells this blood is safe to be transduced.
The main things they look for is whether the blood groups are the same between the donor and the recipient. And whether the rhesus status is compatible between the two blood groups.
If there is an incompatibility in either of the two we call it major blood group incompatibility.
But…
But there are other rare incompatibilities within the human blood other than the major incompatibilities, they are called minor blood group incompatibilities. Some of them are kelly, duffy, and there maybe many undiscovered incompatibilities as well.
And usually we do not check for minor blood group incompatibilities because they are rare and can be expensive to check.
What media got it wrong
The news was reported was that a patient died because he was transfused of the wrong blood group as if the patient died because he was transfused B- when his blood group is B+.
If you did biology or learnt at medical college you might know that there is no incompatibility in B+ and B- and B+ patient can be safely transfused with B- blood without any reaction.
Although the opposite is wrong where a B- patient cannot be transduced with B+ blood.
However in practice this is different, usually in a normal situation doctors try to transfuse the same blood group so there is minimum chance of a reaction. So if the patient is B+ doctors try to transfuse B+. Although B- is theoretically acceptable it is not given in practice.
Only in an emergency doctors will try to give a patient a O- blood, where O- is the only blood group that can be given to any patient and that’s why we call him the universal donor.
So obviously the patient did not die because he was transfused the wrong blood type as the news reported B- for B+ blood. But there must have been some sort of a minor incompatibility between the donor’s blood and the recipient’s blood.
And this could have occurred if he was given B+ blood but had a minor blood group incompatibility.
What’s the fuzz?
The problem with this is type of factually incorrect news reporting can have a negative impact on doctors and medical profession as a whole.
Doctors check everything from the requesting form to the blood pack two to three times before the blood is transfused to make sure there is no such unfortunate events.
What happened was unfortunate and could have been prevented, but it was not unsafe as the media portrayed the way how the unfortunate event happened.
Fun fact..
B- blood group is one of rarest blood groups in the world, accounting for less than 5% of the whole population. While B+ is the common blood group more than 50% of whole population.
So the funny thing is how a blood pack from the rare blood group ended up instead of the common B+ blood group.
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