Blood and blood products transfusion can be life saving, but if not done appropriately and with appropriate precaution, blood transfusion can also cause problem to the recipient of the transfused blood. The complications that can occur due to blood transfusion includes, transmission of infectious agent (from donor to recipient), immunologically mediated adverse reactions (such as hemolysis, graft-versus-host reaction, anaphylactic reaction etc.), non-immunologically mediated adverse reactions such as hypothermia, fluid overload, electrolyte excess etc.

There are several infectious agents that can be transmitted through blood transfusion, but practically very rarely seen in clinical practice due to rigorous screening of blood for infectious agents before transfusion,

Every year World Health Day is celebrated on 7th April which is the day World Health Organization was born or came into existence. The World Health Day is based on a theme selected by World Health Organization and the theme of 2010 World Health Day is “Urbanization: a challenge for public health” and the World Health Day 2010 campaign is “1000 cities, 1000 lives”.

Why the theme?

The World Health Organization select a theme based on the importance of the particular subject and this year’s theme was selected to give importance to the public health problems of the cities across the globe. At present context the subject of healthy cities is very important as more than 50% of world population live in cities. In the year 2007 itself more than half of the world population started living in the cities, which is only growing and it is estimated that by 2030 more than 60% of the world population will reside in cities. Here lies the importance of urban health and so the World Health Day theme. At present more than 3 billion people live in cities.