What is "Know Your Blood" cause?

Most of us are unaware of their blood groups – even for their life time. Usually we get to know about our blood group at the time when we, someone or one of our loved ones need blood in some kind of serious situations.

The “Know Your Blood” cause is an effort to spread the awareness among all humans, to have knowledge about their blood group. One should aware of his/her blood group and the family, friends and love ones should know about it. This can create a mesh network of blood group information and can help a lot in finding right blood in the nick of time.

This cause does nothing except making you enough literate about the importance of knowing about your blood, and defines a few simple and easy ways to help others to know about your blood group.

Why do you need to know about your blood group?

Finding the blood donors for the required blood group sometime requires much efforts and money. For instance, one of your beloved people is in a critical condition at hospital and doctors have asked you to arrange B+ve type of blood donors. The blood is required during operations, surgery or transplants. You need 5, 6 or more bottles, and you think of your contacts first that who may have B+ve type of blood. You find no one in your mind, then you start calling everyone to confirm for blood group. At this time (mostly) you get surprised that more than 70% (rough estimation) of your contacts are not aware of their blood groups, but they are willing to donate the blood. You take a chance and call them for donation. At hospital, during blood group check and/or cross matching, you find that more than 50% people don’t have the matching group. You re-initiate your search; you spread word among your links. Although (roughly 90%), you find the required blood and the quantity, but it took much time and money efforts to end up with the targets.

While, if your contacts are aware about their blood groups, your search may run fast, and if they are in habit of putting their blood information (blood group) with their general contact information, you may be able to find even much faster and easier.

This is where the “Know Your Blood” cause comes into existence. This is one simple scenario; there may be thousands of other critical situations. So, take some initiative and help yourself (as well as others) to live for a cause. It costs nothing except helping the humanity.

How you can help?

You can help in many ways; the simplest and easiest way is to have a blood group checkup once in a life time (as early as possible), so that whenever someone asks for a certain blood type, you may become able to help him/her right away.

However, we have created a few more ways to help others, by displaying your blood information with your contact information, online presence, wallet cards, markers to place on your National Identity Cards (wherever NIC lacks such info), websites, forums and etc.

You can display the right image (having your blood group) as your favorite IM’s display picture, so that your contacts will know about your blood group – and in contrast you will be able to know of others.

You can put a tiny marker on your favorite picture, which you are using with your favorite IM as a display picture. We have created a tool where you can upload your favorite picture and can get the picture marked with your blood group to use with your IM. In this case you won’t need to sacrifice for your favorite picture.

Wallet cards and markers for NIC are physical paper printed materials, which you can request for free by filling online request form, via regular mail, phone or fax.