HOUSE OF THE WEEK

An abundance of space at FMI City

CERTAINLY, space is not a problem in this house – once you get there. Over the Hlaing River, 45 minutes from downtown, there is a large one-storey house in a big compound waiting for someone ready to trade time for space. ...more

Yangon Weather Forecast, Burma

Brewery to increase blood donations

MYANMAR Brewery Ltd (MBL) plans to organise blood donation ceremonies twice a year starting in 2010, a company official said earlier this month.

Since 2006 the company has held five blood donation ceremonies at irregular intervals.

But starting in 2010 the brewery will organise donation events twice a year “to raise awareness among donors and to provide better supplies to the National Blood Bank”, said Mr Peter Ong, the managing director of MBL.

He was speaking at the company’s most recent blood donation event, held on December 15 at Yangon General Hospital.

“With MBL’s continuing support, we hope we can help build a safe volunteer network among donors, and that we can fulfil the needs of patients with our own safe blood,” Mr Ong said.

He said that every two seconds, someone somewhere in the world is in need of emergency blood supplies.

“As the pace of life increases, so does the rate of accidents. According to statistics, one person dies every six minutes and 10 are injured in the same time frame,” he said. “Non- availability of blood is the major cause of death.”

Mr Ong added that one of main causes of blood shortages was lack of awareness among the general population about the importance of maintaining supplies through volunteer donations.

“We have had a total of 1335 donors during our five donation ceremonies since 2006, including 208 [on December 15]. The number of donors has increased at each event,” Mr Ong said.

Blood donation ceremonies organised by MBL are held under the name Myanmar Care and occur simultaneously at three different venues on the day of the event: Yangon General Hospital, MBL headquarters in Yangon’s Mingalardon township, and the company’s Mandalay branch office.

The National Blood Bank says it provides 85 percent of the blood needed by patients in Yangon, with 69,724 blood bags supplied this year up to the end of October.