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08-01-2024
IBADAN, NIGERIA: A wave of red corrugated roofs welcomes visitors to the city of Ibadan in southwest Nigeria. Inside the 200-year-old city’s centre, incessant traffic winds through narrow, unpaved roads and past crowded open-air markets.
At the edge of the city, Opeyemi Dasola’s home, a square fortress of cement, is a calm oasis. Dasola, a StreetSide cheese seller, is a quiet soul, and the only sound in her living room is the gentle hum of the air conditioner circulating air through the sparsely furnished space but just a week earlier, this house was rocked with chaos. Fowarogun, Dasola’s 17-year-old daughter, had woken at midnight with a shooting pain starting in her feet and eventually engulfing every part of her body. The girl was frightened, but Dasola already knew what was causing the problem.
Fowarogun had been diagnosed with sickle cell anaemia, a hereditary condition that limits the supply of oxygen to the blood, when she was four years old. The disorder occurs due to clusters of sickle-shaped red blood cells, which can obstruct blood vessels, hindering blood flow around the body. It can shorten life expectancy by 20 to 30 years in many countries, but in Nigeria, about 80 percent of sufferers do not even make it to the age of five. The mean age of death for those who do is currently just over 21.
This is a condition that Fowarogun’s mother has learned to manage by giving her daily folic acid supplements and avoiding extreme temperatures. Nevertheless, roughly every three years, Fowarogun requires a blood transfusion to keep her healthy.
Obtaining blood for her daughter is a source of great anxiety for Dasola. Severe blood shortages have left patients in 
Nigeria scrambling to find their own private donors, a practice that is illegal, according to the country’s blood regulator, the National Blood Transfusion Commission. The unmet demand for blood, however, has spawned a black market in which people donate blood for profit and where there are few regulations to ensure the blood is free of disease and safe to use.
With a population of 200 million people, Nigeria requires an estimated 1.8 million units of blood each year for patients who have been in accidents, undergo surgery and need it to treat conditions such as anaemia and other genetic blood disorders. However, each year, only about 500,000 pints (236,600 litres) of blood are collected through official channels. Nigerians are often reluctant to give blood because of beliefs that donating it will make them sick or will weaken men’s libidos.
The National Blood Transfusion Commission faces other challenges besides low supplies. Lack of funding is a major problem, Amedu Omale, the commission’s former director general, told media shortly before he retired in August.
He said it will cost an estimated $15m to reform the system but it has received only $50,000 from the government since its creation in 2021 by the National Assembly. Before the commission, Nigeria’s blood service was run by the National Blood Transfusion Service, which was created in 1990 and was merely a task force under the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare without much decision-making power. Media contacted the ministry for comment but received no reply. (Int’l News Desk)
