Kabul (EFE).- “I’m tired, I’ve been running everywhere for three hours looking for blood. If you are from the same group, please help us,” pleads Wasima, who, like hundreds of other Afghans, has been affected by the shortage at the Asian country’s Central Blood Bank due to a lack of international aid and an increase in patients.
Wasima, desperate to find blood for her little brother, explained to EFE that the institution had run out of type A- reserves that day.
The main body of the Asian country to collect and distribute blood daily to hundreds of patients is practically dry, the director of the medical institution, Dr. Mohammad Nasir Sadiq, confirmed to EFE.
“We have more than 1,200 registered patients, mostly children with blood diseases such as thalassemia and hemophilia, and they all need fresh blood, which in our current situation is a challenge,” he lamented.
The service is overloaded with patients
The service is overloaded with patients and the international organizations that largely managed the center have stopped their activities in the country, after the ban on the work of Afghans in NGOs imposed by the Taliban.
“Until now, international aid helped us with services, such as bus drives to collect fresh blood, but this assistance has stopped,” said Sadiq, who called not to “politicize” the aid.
However, the Taliban’s decision to ban women’s work has infuriated the international community, which appears to have turned off the aid spigot.
According to the UN, so far this year the organization has only received less than 5% of the funding required to help the country, which makes Afghanistan the aid operation with the least funding worldwide, despite experiencing the largest and most severe humanitarian crisis in the world.
Donors drop in Afghanistan for Ramadan
Added to the lack of international funds is the decline in donors due to Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, according to the official, as well as the shortage of medicines that put the lives of patients in Afghanistan at risk.
“Despite the fact that the Government is trying to provide the necessary medicines, there is a lack of medicines such as vaccines and tablets that thalassemia patients need after transfusions,” the director of the wing specializing in this disease, Abdul Hameed Zaheer, explained to EFE.
The economic crisis that Afghanistan is facing, exacerbated by the arrival of the Taliban to power in August 2021, means that many families cannot afford treatment. Sadiq recalled how a person was forced to sell his shoes to get his son to the hospital.
Going into debt so you can take your child to the hospital
Abdul Hadi, 65, from the remote northeastern province of Ghor, lamented to EFE that he had been forced to go into debt to take his son, affected by kidney disease, to the Kabul hospital.
“I even borrowed money for transportation, how can I buy medicine and blood?” she lamented.
And that when the blood bank has supplies.
“Sometimes I need blood for my son and the hospital doesn’t have it, so I rush out and ask people to donate blood, but it’s hard to find someone of the same type,” Hadi said.
Mohammad Asif knows well the desperation of the search against time.
Now she must go to the blood bank every month and a half to treat her youngest daughter for thalassemia, a hereditary disease that does not allow those who suffer from it to produce enough hemoglobin, but her family has already been in charge of treating her younger brother for fourteen years. afflicted with the same ailment and now deceased.
“I don’t think this disease has a solution, apart from giving blood. We gave him blood for 14 years, until he died from various diseases caused by transfusions, ”he said.