New Delhi, Oct. 19: Blood banks across India may exchange blood and blood products under proposed regulations that transfusion medicine specialists say will help ease scarcity and avoid destruction of surplus blood-derived products.

The Union health ministry announced today that the National Blood Transfusion Council has recommended that blood may be transferred from one blood bank to another, a transaction prohibited under current regulations.

The council has also set an exchange value of Rs 1,600 per litre for plasma to regulate the barter exchange of surplus plasma by blood banks for consumables, equipment or plasma-derived products - without cash exchanges. In the absence of this rule, blood banks now trade or sell surplus plasma without any regulations and, at times, need to destroy surplus plasma that remains unused beyond its shelf-life of about a year.

"These proposals will help during times of blood and blood products scarcity," said Prasun Bhattacharya, a transfusion medicine specialist at the Calcutta Medical College. "The new rules will also avoid wastage of blood products."

Experts in the Indian Society of Transfusion Medicine estimate India's annual demand for blood-derived red blood cells at 1.2 crore units. Many blood banks store other products such as human albumin, immunoglobulin, clotting factors and plasma.

When a hospital blood bank does not have, or is running short of, a specific blood product, patients' relatives need to under current rules carry requisition slips to another blood bank seeking the release of that product. This places the burden of the procurement on patients.

"The last thing you want relatives to do is running around instead of being close to the patients," said Harshal Lowalekar, assistant professor of operations management at IIM-Indore who has analysed India's blood-banking operations. "But that's exactly what many have to do now."

Lowalekar said allowing exchanges would, in principle, even allow virtual networks of blood banks within a city and its suburbs to keep track of inventories and exchange products before their end of shelf-life. According to Bhattar

charya, about 15 per cent of stored surplus plasma is thrown away every year.

The transfer and exchange rules are also expected to alleviate shortages of blood-derived products. "Last year, there was an acute shortage of human albumin - this exchange will now allow blood banks to trade in plasma and procure albumin," Bhattacharya said.

Earlier this year, researchers at the Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences had after a study of transfusion practices pointed out the need for fresh guidelines to improve transfusion practices in the country. The health ministry's Transfusion Council is the apex body for formulating policies relating to the operation standards of blood transfusion services.