Bombay Blood Group:
In a rare and complex medical procedure, a 30-year-old woman with the extremely rare ‘Bombay’ (hh) blood group underwent a successful kidney transplant in India.
- The Bombay, also known as HH, blood group is a rare blood group first discovered in Mumbai in 1952 by Y.M. Bhende.
- The Bombay blood group lacks A, B and H antigens, which are found in the common ABO blood groups.
- In normal individuals, the H antigen serves as the base structure for building A and B antigens. In Bombay blood group individuals, the gene responsible for producing the H antigen is mutated or absent, so neither A nor B antigens can be formed.
- Consequently, the people with Bombay Blood Group are incompatible with all standard blood types, including O-negative, complicating both transfusions and organ transplants.
- They can only receive blood from another Bombay blood group donor. Its prevalence is about 0.0004% (one in 4 million) of the total human population.
- While it drops to one in a million in the European population and one in 10,000 in Mumbai, the act of finding a donor is still daunting.
