KARACHI, Oct 24: The government-run blood centres all over the province will soon start screening donor blood for Hepatitis C virus, in addition to the existing free facilities for Hepatitis C virus and HIV screening, as part of measures to remove blood safety problems.

Speaking about the objectives and activities of the Sindh Safe Blood Transfusion Authority which has started functioning recently, the manager of the Authority, Dr Altaf A. Shaikh, told Dawn on Monday that the Sindh health department had already bought HCV screening kits from its own funds for distribution among the blood centres. The federal government was responsible for providing HBV and HIV screening kits to all the four provinces.

He said the Authority had been established after the Sindh Assembly, in 1998, approved a legislation, which also included the setting up of an Authority to regulate the entire network of blood banks, blood-screening centres, and blood-transfusion facilities throughout the province and provide them guidelines and capabilities to ensure safe and rational blood transfusion.

With this end in view, the Authority had decided to register all blood providing and screening facilities in the province. In the next phase the registered facilities would be evaluated in respect of their services and procedures. Only those centres and facilities whose functioning was considered satisfactory by the Authority’s evaluation team would be given licence to continue functioning, he said. A proforma would be issued in a few days to provide necessary guidelines to the blood centres.

Periodic inspection of licensed facilities would be undertaken to ensure effective quality control. Those found deviating from the guidelines would be penalized according to law.

According to Dr Shaikh, the Authority’s main aim was to promote the concept of safe blood transfusion. For this reason, it was striving for an adequate provision of healthy blood from healthy volunteer donors, ensuring facilities for proper storage, screening and testing of blood.

He said the Authority, through its various regulations, would ensure that blood transfusion, a life-saving supportive therapy, was carried out only when necessary and under proper conditions, so that the practice of unnecessary and unsafe blood transfusions was eliminated.