People forgetting or being uncertain about their blood type is far from scarce, but it almost cost a 50-year-old woman from Nantou County her life were it not for a timely blood test.
Chiu Li-kuei (邱麗桂), a Nantou Hospital medical technologist, spoke about the incident on the sidelines of an awards ceremony held by the Ministry of Health and Welfare in Taipei yesterday morning to honor 50 medical specialists, including Chiu, for their special dedication and stellar achievements.
The 50 recipients were selected from 1,986 medical personnel at 26 hospitals nationwide.
“The woman always thought that she was blood type O, a belief reinforced by a lack of discomfort after she was transfused with type O blood following a traffic accident two decades ago,” Chiu said.
Two years ago, Chiu said the patient came to the hospital to undergo bone surgery and a preoperative blood test found that her blood was not the classic type O.
A further test discovered that the woman actually had the rarest blood type, Bombay phenotype hh, Chiu said, adding that irregular antibodies were also detected in her body that could have been produced after the blood transfusion 20 years previously.
“If she had been given classic type O blood during the surgery, the woman could have suffered a potentially fatal red blood cell rupture, also known as a hemolytic reaction,” Chiu said.
According to the Taiwan Blood Services Foundation, Bombay phenotype hh has an incidence rate of one in 10,000 people and is commonly mistaken for type O.
“Like the classic blood group, the Bombay blood group can also be divided into four types — O, A, B and AB. As of last year, 66 people in the nation were known to have type A Bombay phenotype blood, 61 with type B, 51 with type O and 11 with type AB,” foundation official Li Lei (黎蕾) said.
FATAL FIRE: The health department is trying to contact the inspector who visited the site of the illegal nursing home to ask why they did not advise follow-up checks The Taipei City Government yesterday said that a health department inspector last year had visited the site of a long-term care facility in Neihu District (內湖) after receiving a report questioning its status. A fire broke out at the facility on Tuesday afternoon, killing three people. The Taipei Fire Department said that it received a report about a fire on the first floor of a four-story residential building on Kangning Road Sec. 1 at 2:38pm on Tuesday, firefighters arrived at 2:43pm and the fire was put out by 3:07pm. The firefighters found three men in beds and rushed them to hospital for
Taipei City Councilor Wang Hao (王浩) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Monday called for security improvements to the MRT, as fare evasion has increased more than 13-fold on the metropolitan railway system over the past five years. Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has spoken out against fare evasion and other contraventions of MRT regulations, but since he took office in 2015 the number of contraventions has more than doubled, Wang said, adding that there were 537 cases in 2015 compared with 959 last year. A video was posted to YouTube in June showing people how to evade paying a fare,
FEELING MISUNDERSTOOD: Media speculation has fueled confusion about the KMT’s reasons for skipping a Chinese forum and delaying an AIT meeting, party sources said The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Sunday said that it is not seeking to improve relations with the US or China at the expense of the other, and that its relations with the countries would be topic-based. The party has faced questions over its foreign policy after it on Monday last week announced its withdrawal from the annual Straits Forum and delayed planned talks with the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT). The party has also taken a tough stance on the importation of US meat containing ractopamine, while also lambasting China for increasing its military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait. Following
Yuchi Township (魚池) fishers have appealed to the Nantou County Government for help in dealing with an invasive fish species in Sun Moon Lake (日月潭), where it has devastated the local ecosystem. Fishers at Sun Moon Lake have been using electrofishing in an attempt to eliminate the giant snakehead fish — found in Africa and Southeast Asia — but they have struggled to keep up with the growing population of the species, which breeds during September and October, the county government said on Monday. The county has contacted researchers at National Tsing Hua University, saying it hoped they could come up
RSS