Blood donors save countless lives


For many years Murray has donated blood regularly without getting anything in return except the peace-of-mind that he is making a difference in the lives of many people that he has never even seen.
“I first donated blood when I was about 19 or 20, and after that i just kept on,’ says Murray. ‘I work in the health profession and I feel it is the right thing to do. At this stage nothing motivates me to donate blood, I just go and do it.”
On October 17, Murray once again sacrificed his time to donate another unit of his blood at the Bethlehem branch of the SANBS where he has been donating for many years.
“I feel very good after donating blood, I always sleep well after that,” says Murray. “I am a universal donor, my blood type is O-negative, a very rare blood type. Anyone can use my blood as the O-blood is the only blood type that can be transfused to patients of other blood types.”
Rochelle van der Merwe, the spokesperson for the SANBS in Bethlehem added that this blood type is mostly used in newborn babies. They have a project called ‘Safe Mothers Safe Babies’ where they keep O-negative blood in hospitals around the Free State areas they serve incase there is an urgent need of blood for new born babies.
“People’s lives have greatly improved from receiving blood – this is always the best news to every donor,” said Van der Merwe.
The Bethlehem SANBS shared a wonderful story of a 26-year-old Ditshitso Moloi who recently celebrated his birthday by donating his first unit of blood. When Moloi was 12-years old he was diagnosed with cancer and received blood as part of his treatment. “I thank all the blood donors because I could donate blood on this day due to blood donors that saved my life and gave me another birthday,” Moloi was quoted as saying.
Although there has been an increase in the number of blood donors in Bethlehem over the years, the SANBS has never stopped recruiting more people to donate. “We do have people donating blood regularly in Bethlehem but we are also aiming to get new people,” says Van der Merwe. Currently not even one percent of the population donates blood.
* Selloane Molakeng is the OurHealth Citizen Journalist reporting from Bethlehem in the Free State.
Author
-
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
View all posts
Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Blood donors save countless lives
by Health-e News, Health-e News
October 21, 2012