India's first and world's tenth unique blood group found in Gujarat man

New Delhi, July 13: In a first, a new blood group has been found in India, which is also the rarest in the world. A 65-year-old man from Gujarat who is a heart patient has been identified with EMM negative blood group, a unique blood type which cannot be categorized into the existing groups of ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘O’ or ‘AB’.

 

In general, there are four types of blood groups in the human body, which further consist of 42 types of systems, like A, B, O, Rh and Duffy. There are also 375 types of antigens in which EMM is high.

 

However, there are only 10 such people in the world who do not have EMM high-frequency antigen in their blood, which makes them different from normal humans. People with such rarest blood groups can neither donate their blood to anyone, nor can they acquire it from anyone.

 

 

 

So far, there were only 9 people in the world with such rarest blood group, but now, a 65-year-old man from Gujarat's Rajkot has been identified with the said blood group.

 

Sanmukh Joshi, doctor at Samarpan Blood Donation Center, Surat, said that the 65-year-old patient who had been undergoing treatment in Ahmedabad after suffering a heart attack was in need of blood for heart surgery. However, it was when his blood type was not found in the Prathama Laboratory of Ahmedabad, that the samples were sent to the blood donation centre in Surat.

 

After examination, the sample did not match with any group, following which blood samples of the elderly man along with his relatives' were sent to America for investigation.

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