Centre Saifee Rd, Block F, North Nazimabad, Karachi

021-36644490 SBTA Registered
Burhani Blood Bank & Thalassaemia Centre

SBTA-registered · North Nazimabad, Karachi

One donation is
another 21 days for a
thalassaemia child.

We began as an evening venture by young community medical students, in one room. Today the centre transfuses around 200 thalassaemia patients on donated, fully screened blood — and it runs out the moment donors stop coming.

Donate blood Request blood for a patient

Can you donate? SBTA criteria

18–60
years of age
45 kg
minimum weight
12.5
g/dl haemoglobin
3 mths
since last donation
The transfusion day room at the centre, patients of all ages in reclining chairs with blood units hanging beside them.

Every unit is screened before it reaches a patient

Mandatory panel under the Sindh Safe Blood Transfusion Act 2017
  • HIV
  • Hepatitis B
  • Hepatitis C
  • Syphilis
  • Malaria
A gloved technician working a blood grouping tray in the centre laboratory, sample tubes racked beside it.
200
registered thalassaemia patients
5,000+
blood donors
1997
the year it started
Screened blood units in the cold store, each bag labelled with the Burhani Blood Bank name, collection date and blood group.

The blood bank

Screened blood, at cost, to whoever needs it

The BBB began as an evening venture by young community medical students, with a conviction: to provide the community, and mankind at large, with blood - a source of life in its purest and most accessible form.

What the bank does
A young patient smiling in the transfusion chair, a line taped to her hand.

The thalassaemia centre

Around 200 children on a transfusion cycle

Thalassaemia is lurking high in Pakistan. Statistics indicate that between 3,000 and 4,000 children are born with the more virulent form of the disease - thalassaemia major - every year.

The thalassaemia programme

Help us stop thalassaemia

Not just a dream — a commitment with every heartbeat.

Play is life for a child, and deprived of play the child is a prisoner, shut off from all that makes life real. It is through play that children learn and make sense of the world. Each year thousands of children are born deprived of that right. Here at the Burhani Blood Bank our objectives, our goals and our ambitions hold steadfastly to this as the pivot of everything we do.

It is hard to watch families disown children born with an illness that they themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, passed on as an inheritance — one the child then lives with for the whole of their life.

Eradicating it from Pakistan

There is much still to do, but it has to start somewhere. Counselling and awareness are how the disease stops being inherited.

  • Families of thalassaemia minors are counselled against marriages between carriers, which is where the disease is passed on.
  • A pre-natal test at 12 to 18 weeks of gestation, known as CVS, can diagnose the condition in the fetus.
  • The Sindh Assembly has passed a bill making pre-marital thalassaemia screening compulsory.
  • Seminars and public awareness programmes are run regularly.
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