This Friday, the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital in South East Nigeria will inaugurate that African country’s first known safe blood bank system—thanks to the Rotary Club of Carmel Valley.

In May 2002, Carmel Valley Rotarian Warren Kaufman led a Group Study Exchange trip to Nigeria. Such trips take place annually between Rotary clubs worldwide, and are meant to foster professional and personal relationships.

On that trip, Kaufman became friendly with Edemekong Edemekong, a Nigerian superior court justice and fellow Rotarian. He also visited the Uyo Teaching Hospital, and learned about the desperate need for safe blood banks in Nigeria.

As in most of Africa, Nigerian hospitals lacks blood storage facilities for people needing transfusions. A patient’s family and friends have to find on-the-spot donors, sometimes literally going out in the streets and paying people.

Often, donors with the correct blood type are not found in time; sometimes, even when they are, the transfusions can be deadly. According to Rotary statistics, about ten percent of Nigeria’s adult population is infected with HIV, and even more with hepatitis.

Of every 1,000 Nigerians who need a blood transfusion, 240 die, either from lack of blood or from receiving infected blood. And 97 percent of those fatalities are women in childbirth, or anemic children under the age of 14.

“It’s a huge tragedy,” Kaufman says. “Childbirth is a life-threatening event in Nigeria—often the mother dies. Among certain tribes it’s considered the child’s fault.”

In June 2003, Justice Edemekong, just named president of his local Rotary, suggested to Kaufman that their two clubs tackle the blood bank problem as a joint service project. The Uyo Teaching Hospital seemed the perfect spot for a pilot program.

“I was impressed with the chief of staff there,” says Kaufman. “He was young, bright, and very optimistic. He told me he had big plans for his hospital, even though its facilities are very meager.”

The Carmel Valley Rotary Club, with help from a Rotary Club in Visalia, purchased a blood storage system from Hobart/Foster International in the UK, on condition that the British company ensure that the equipment made it through Nigerian Customs and actually get installed in the Uyo hospital (previous shipments of wheelchairs, also donated by Rotarians, are still stuck in Customs, Kaufman says). The Rotarians also purchased a small generator for the refrigeration unit—Nigeria experiences regular rolling blackouts, and most areas of the country are without power one-third of the time.

The clincher, Kaufman says, was finding Dr. John Watson-Williams, a retired UC-Davis hematology professor now living in Carmel Valley who had set up safe blood donor systems in Uganda, Zambia and post-Soviet Georgia. As it happens, Dr. Watson-Williams lived in Nigeria from 1957 to 1962, working as the country’s first hematologist, and had been asked by the World Health Organization to develop a safe blood donor system there.

That project was not implemented, Watson-Williams says, because of the instability of Nigeria’s government at the time, “but it helped me make recommendations for the current program,” he says. The key for Nigeria, he says, is to get rid of the paid-donor system, and develop an all-volunteer donor base.

“Volunteers are a much safer donor pool,” he says. “If we have a mechanical blood bank and can refrigerate blood safely, then we can store blood ahead of the need.”

To that end, the new Uyo blood bank will initially use only blood donated by its local Rotary Club members, hospital staff, and Red Cross workers.

As the project progressed, Kaufman realized it was a shame to do all this work for just one blood bank. He and Edemekong expanded it into a national project called Safe Blood Africa, with Kaufman as director. Twenty-two Carmel Valley Rotarians are working on the project. They’ve developed brochures and CDs for other American Rotary clubs, to show how easy it is to sponsor a blood bank: each one costs a local club just $5,000. Those funds are matched by the club’s district, and by a Rotary International foundation.

“One blood bank is likely to save more than 800 lives a year,” Kaufman says. “For a one-time investment of $5,000 we can save 800 lives this year, 800 lives next year, and 800 the year after that. Finding that out, you can’t put it down. It’s an incredible opportunity to serve.”

Kaufman is in Nigeria this week to attend Friday’s dignitary-studded ceremony. He will also visit a nearby town that will receive Carmel Valley Rotary Club’s second blood bank system this fall.

“We have four more in the works,” he says. “We hope to have 10 total this year, and 20 more next year.” Each one involves partnering with the local Rotary club in Nigeria, and a local hospital—a real people-to-people project, without government aid.

“Nigeria has 130 million people, the largest country in Africa,” Kaufman continues. “Our intention is to take this project through all of Nigeria, and put an organization together so we can move into other African countries.”

And as he stands in the 98-degree heat this Friday in Uyo, soaked in perspiration, watching the installation of the blood bank he was instrumental in securing, Kaufman says he will feel overwhelmed: “It’s the culmination of many miracles.”

For information on Safe Blood Africa, call Bryan Golden at 659-5017 or Warren Kaufman at 620-1780, or visit www.safebloodafrica.org.