Determine blood group of a person for a few cents
A team of experts from the Faculty of Engineering at Monash University, Australia, has developed a simple analysis to determine instantly the blood group of a person at a cost of only a few cents.
The analysis requires placing a drop of blood on a specially treated paper strip.
In the study Gil Garnier and colleagues have conducted on this new analysis, has proven its success, and they believe it would be very useful for health in the developing countries.
The new analysis could also be used in veterinary medicine to determine the blood group of the animal of interest on the farm, without having to resort to expensive and cumbersome instruments.
Determining a patient’s blood group is vital for successful blood transfusion. Blood transfusions saved every year millions of lives around the world.
There are four main blood types: A, B, AB and O. Use of the wrong blood type in a patient can be fatal. Current methods to determine blood require the use of sophisticated instruments is not available in many poor parts of the world. An inexpensive and portable analysis could solve this problem.
In tests carried out with prototypes of the strips of paper for analysis, using blood samples from human volunteers, scientists have found that a drop of blood placed on the strip causes a color change indicating blood type. The results of the tests were as accurate as those obtained through traditional methods to determine the blood group of a sample.