From Milan the solidarity relay to donate rare blood to a Sicilian woman

The one organized by the Polyclinic of Milan was a real “relay” to bring blood bags of a very rare type to Sicily to allow a Sicilian woman, suffering from sickle cell anemia, to receive a life-saving transplant , for which many transfusions were needed. Help came from 20 Lombard blood donors with this rare group, thanks to the coordination of the Transfusion Center of the Polyclinic and a solidarity competition from the Region.
As the Milanese hospital explains in a note, for a donor to be compatible with the Sicilian patient, it was not enough to have the same blood type, but other identical characteristics were also needed, which are found only in one person in several hundred.

The woman, about 50 years old, has suffered from thalasso-sickle cell disease (or sickle cell anemia) since she was 3. Decades of transfusions have led her body to develop antibodies against the donated blood, and to a progressive deterioration of the liver, which have thus the transplant was necessary, but impossible without new transfusions. Sicilian doctors contacted the Rare Blood Bank active at the Transfusion Center of the Policlinico di Milano, which classified over 100,000 blood donors, of which 15,000 rare and 1,000 ultra-rare. Thanks to this database, 30 perfectly compatible rare Lombard donors were identified.

“We then activated the recruitment network involving the Transfusion Centers of the provinces in which these donors were registered – explains Daniele Prati, director of the Polyclinic Transfusion Center – and, in a few months and despite the pandemic, we collected 26 units of compatible blood from from 20 donors: 9 from the Policlinico, 6 from Bergamo, 2 from Lecco, one from the Niguarda Hospital in Milan, one from Brescia and one from Como. Thanks to this rare blood it was possible to bring the patient to the transplant, which was successful a few weeks ago ».