2012
World Blood Donor Day is on 14 June. The date is the birthday of Austrian physician and immunologist Karl Landsteiner, who won the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for developing the modern system of classification of blood groups.
14 June 2012
RIA-Novosti
Blood transfusions are a necessary part of many medical procedures… sectarians should have NO right to refuse them to their minor children. If adult religious nutters wish to die, that’s one thing… if they try to kill a child through their pigheaded idiocy, that’s quite another. Good on the doctors… they did right and they deserve our congratulations and respect.
The actions of the parents of 14-year-old Anton Panchenko, who’re Jehovah’s Witnesses sectarians from Bataisk in Rostov Oblast, nearly killed him. A month ago, he had an accident riding on a scooter. This led to a hip fracture, a ruptured spleen and intestine, lung contusions, and traumatic brain injury. When Anton hovered close to death, questions arose concerning an emergency blood transfusion, but his parents refused the procedure, referring to their religious beliefs. Nevertheless, the doctors had to administer a blood transfusion, according to Экспресс-газета (Express-gazeta: Express Newspaper). “We, as his physicians, were in a complex legal situation… if we went along with his parents, we’d be punished under the principle “they failed to render aid to the dying”. Not to mention the fact that, humanly speaking, to have a 14-year-old guy die because of his parents’ religion is ridiculous”, said Dr Fyodor Sharshov, the chief of paediatric anaesthesiology-resuscitation for the Ministry of Health of Rostov Oblast, head of the paediatric ICU at the Oblast Children’s Hospital. Meanwhile, Anton’s parents threatened to sue the Oblast Children’s Hospital for administering a blood transfusion without their consent.
16 August 2011
Interfax-Religion
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