Incredible new research shows the countries where certain blood types are more prevalent than others.
The fascinating insights produced by World Population Review show the countries with the highest percentage of people with blood types such as O-, the most sought after blood type by medical professionals.
Not all blood is the same, with bloods separated into different types, known as blood groups, depending on a number of factors, determined by the presence or absence of specific antigens, which can be proteins, carbohydrates, glycoproteins, or glycolipids.
Some blood types are incompatible with others meaning that if a patient is given the wrong type in a blood transfusion, their body will attack it like a life-threatening infection rather than a life-saving intervention.
Some blood types are neutral and can be given to anybody, making them invaluable to medics who can give life-saving treatment even when unsure of the blood group of the patient.
O+ is most commonly found in central and south America, with 70% of the top ten countries where this blood group is most common coming from the continent.
Crucially, no European country is in the top 20, with Ireland, placing highest at 29th most common.
Earlier this year, NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) made an urgent appeal for more people with this blood type to donate the potentially life saving blood as stocks dwindled during a cyber attack which slowed the rate at which doctors could match blood types.
Speaking at the time, Dr Gail Miflin, Chief Medical Officer at NHSBT said: ““To support London hospitals to carry out more surgeries and to provide the best care we can for all patients, we need more O Negative and O Positive donors than usual.”
In the UK, only 53% of people have either an O+ or O- blood group, compared to countries such as Ecuador where it belongs to 77% of the population.
Europeans dominate the A+ blood group, with 9 of the 10 countries where it is most prevalent being European.
Meanwhile, Asia tops the list of countries with the highest prevalence of B blood groups.
The range of blood groups on different continents demonstrates the difficulty that medical professionals can have in meeting the needs of minorities in multicultural societies, where limited blood reserves of rarer blood groups makes it hard to match patients.
Currently, there are just under 800,000 regular blood donors nationally, but blood has a shelf life of only 35 days, NHSBT’s chief medical officer Dr Gail Miflin said.
The NHS regularly appeals for people with less common blood groups, which tend to be more common in communities with large black and Asian populations, to donate.
According to the charts, the 10 countries with the highest prevalence of type A+ blood are: Armenia, Norway, Malta, Cyprus, Portugal, Japan, France, Switzerland and Turkey.
Meanwhile, the 10 countries with the highest prevalence of B+ blood type are: Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, Myanmar, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, North Korea, Mongolia and China.
