Chhattisgarh: Eight-year-old given HIV positive blood

Bhopal: An eight-year-old boy has “mistakenly” been “administered HIV positive infected blood” in a hospital in Chhattisgarh.

The boy, a thalassaemia patient, was reportedly given blood by a HIV positive-affected donor in a hospital at Bhillai, nearly 30 km from Raipur, most probably in January this year, preliminary findings by an official probe said on Monday.

“The boy was diagnosed with HIV positive in June this year. He had no records of being affected by the dreaded disease earlier. A probe has begun to identify the donor who had given blood to the boy in the hospital in Bhillai and how the doctors administered him the blood without carrying out HIV tests”, Chhattisgarh state women and child welfare commission chairperson Satabdi Pandey told this newspaper. The boy’s father is working in Bhillai Steel Plant, a unit of SAIL.
The boy being a thalassaemia patient, needed frequent transfusion of blood.