Rare blood type discovered in Indian man

A 65-year-old man from India’s Rajkot was in for a surprise when he could not find blood matching his blood group for a cardiac surgery in 2020. The surprise was compounded as his known blood group was AB positive, the universal acceptor.

His long struggle eventually led to the discovery of India’s first ‘EMM negative’ blood case - the 11th such case across the globe, reports the Times of India

The paper ‘Anti Emm, a rare specificity to the high incidence antigen Emm in an Indian patient defining the new blood group system EMM (ISBT042)’ has been published in Asian Journal of Transfusion Science by Ripal Shah, Snehal Senjaliya and Sanmukh Joshi among others.

Dr Ripal Shah, director of the Prathama Blood Bank in Ahmedabad, said when matching blood was not found at Rajkot blood banks, the patient arrived in Ahmedabad with the same result. “He needed it for a coronary artery bypass grafting surgery. An antibody in the blood was reacting in saline and antiglobulin phases. Even his children’s blood did not match his,” she said.