AfricaPress-mozambique: Monday, June 14, is World Blood Donor Day, this year celebrated under the motto “Give blood and keep the world-beating”.
To support the event, the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Mozambique (IURD), and the Ministry of Health (MISAU), through the National Blood Service (SENASA), last Saturday, June 12, promoted a country-wide blood donation campaign that mobilised more than 1,000 donors.
In Maputo city alone, just over 700 units of blood were collected, in an event witnessed by the Deputy Minister of Health, Lídia Cardoso, the Deputy National Director of the National Blood Service, Dina Ibrahimo, the National Director of Religious Affairs, Celestino Aliasse Jamal and the President of IURD in Mozambique, José Guerra.
Speaking on the occasion, Lidia Cardoso noted that the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God had been a major partner in mobilising blood donation, among other health actions.
The Deputy-Minister of Health mentioned, for example, that this religious confession had proved able to mobilize its members to participate in blood donation campaigns whenever MISAU asked it to.
In his speech, the President of IURD in Mozambique, José Guerra, said that lack of blood in health units compromised efforts to save lives, and that the IURD would like to be able to mobilise more donors, but Covid-19 restrictions did not allow it.
World Blood Donor Day was instituted at the initiative of the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2014 in honour of the birth of Karl Landsteiner (14 June, 1868 to 26 June 1943), an Austrian immunologist who distinguished the main blood groups in 1900, discovering the Rh factor and why, when different blood types were mixed, they sometimes clotted.
