Żejtun man is 106 times a donor

In November 1975, the promise of a day's special leave lured a group of shipyard workers to the Knights of Malta headquarters in Floriana to donate blood.

Almost 34 years on, one of these men still donates blood every three months, clocking up 106 donations so far and giving more than 10 times a person's total volume of blood.

"The 106 times I donated blood were the best 106 moments of my life," Joe Baldacchino, of Żejtun, said as World Blood Donors Day was marked yesterday.

Leafing through numerous booklets chronicling his donation history, which he described as his "heart's accounts", Mr Baldacchino recounts the day which catapulted him into donating almost 50 litres of blood over three decades.

"After donating blood, we went out for lunch and then to watch a movie," he said.

The group, 10 in all, agreed to go back after three months but eventually started dropping out one by one.

"But I said that I wanted to continue. I did not bother about my friends not joining me," he said.

Picking up a neatly folded sheet of paper on which he has chronologically listed all his donations, he points to one in particular, which he describes as "special". Dated 01/01/2000, it is the first donation of the millennium.

"It is special and the staff wrote it in red on the booklet to mark its importance," he said.

Rather than partying all night and sleeping late, Mr Baldacchino woke up early and went to the National Blood Transfusion Services, next to St Luke's Hospital, arriving before the unit had opened. "I wanted to be the first," he admits.

The father-of-one describes donating blood as an important part of his life. "I am constantly looking through the booklets and thinking about the next donation," he said.

The 58-year-old describes blood donation as a "simple procedure" which does not hurt.

"They just prick your finger to take a sample of your blood and being examined by a doctor, you sit on the couch and are hooked to equipment and start the donation.

"It is easy and does not hurt. Some people think that they will die, but I have gone more than 100 times and am still alive," he laughed.

"I will continue going until they tell me that I have to stop. I cannot give money to people in need but I can give them something else."

Saving lives through donations

More than 230,000 Maltese people can donate blood. But, according to the National Blood Transfusion Services, barely five per cent do so.

But these 11,000-odd people are saving lives, keeping stocks at the Guardamangia-based blood bank at acceptable levels.

However, supplies of particular blood groups at times run low, threatening operations which need a good stock of blood to be carried out.

"We face a daily challenge. Unlike fund-raising marathons, we cannot collect next week what we did not manage to collect today," blood donation nurse Tony Micallef said.

And stocks sometimes run so low that the NBTS launches national appeals, urging people to give some of their blood to save lives. And usually, hundreds of people heed the cry for help and rush to the centre to give blood.

The worry that constantly plagues the blood bank management is that a severe accident will wipe out their supplies. Mr Micallef said a person involved in a traffic accident might easily need between 20 and 30 bags of blood while a woman haemorrhaging after giving birth might also need 20 bags.

"Many times our stocks are low enough that if we have two serious accidents we will have to stop operations because we do not have enough reserves," he said.

However, the blood bank has never had to turn any blood requests away, and Mr Micallef said calls for help are well received by the population, with people sometimes waiting for long hours to give blood.

He explained that every person can donate 450 millilitres of blood at one time - a tenth of the total volume of blood in a person's body. Men can make a donation every three months while women can donate blood every four months.

History of blood donation

The first reported blood transfusion was made in Rome, on Pope Innocent VII, in 1492. But this was not successful and he died soon afterwards. The first successful recorded transfusion happened almost two centuries later, in 1665, by English physician Richard Lower who transfused blood from one dog to another. Two years later, Dr Lower and Jean-Baptiste Denis reported successful transfusions from animals to humans but this practice became illegal after some people died. The first successful human-to-human transfusion was done by Syng Physick in America in 1795. In 1900, Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner discovered three human blood groups and was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1930.