Need blood? In Myanmar, call the monastery

That’s what happened when Jerome Geronimo, a Canadian teacher at an international school in Yangon, came down with dengue fever in August, two weeks after arriving in the country. With his platelet count plummeting, doctors hospitalized him. They brought in a monk, drew and filtered his blood and gave Geronimo a transfusion.

“I understand that with the limitations of this country you can’t have nice, fresh blood ready to go,” Geronimo said afterward. “I crossed my fingers and hoped he was all OK.”

The austere lifestyle left by monks — they’re expected to abstain from alcohol and sexual relations, for starters — makes them desirable blood donors.

Moreover, they see blood and organ donation as a way to satisfy one of the key precepts of their religious calling, said the venerable Malasiri, a monk at the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University. He spoke as a light rain fell on the bucolic campus in Yangon.

“Blood donation is the first step in morality,” he said, adding that a monk “doesn’t care if [the recipient] is poor or rich … Christian or Buddhist; Muslim, white or black."

Of course, Christians, Muslims and Hindus here also give blood, but Myanmar remains a traditional, largely Buddhist realm where monks are equal parts spiritual leader, teacher, political activist and sometimes celebrity. They are revered by the more than 80 percent Buddhist majority and won international acclaim for defying the former military regime.

But there can also be a darker side. Some extremist monks, like Mandalay-based Ashin Wirathu, have helped stir up anti-Muslim sentiments and violence over the past two years, imperiling the country’s reform process.

And health care has been a flash point in rising Buddhist-Muslim tensions. In the western state of Rakhine, the minority Muslim Rohingya — many of whom are deemed illegal immigrants by the government despite being in the country for generations — are denied government health care and instead rely on international charities. In February, the state government forced Doctors Without Borders’ Holland branch out of the region after violence from local Buddhists, prompting a health crisis that effectively left thousands of Muslims without access to basic health care services for months. The government allowed the aid group to restart limited operations in Rakhine in September.

That kind of strife has been avoided in Yangon. And Shoaib M. Madha, an administrator at the Muslim Free Hospital, a charity-funded hospital in downtown Yangon, noted that after relatives and the government bank, its doctors will go to Buddhist monks for blood. They give “regardless of race, religion, creed or caste,” he said.

The demand for blood in Myanmar is rising by 15 to 20 percent per year, noted Krongthong Thimasarn, the World Health Organization’s acting representative in Myanmar. WHO officials, she said, began working with the Ministry of Health in 2003 — eight years before the former military junta handed power to a civilian government — to develop a national plan to support blood transfusions, training on serology techniques and greater access to test kits.

Progress is being made. Through an improved screening system and a more reliable network of donors — monks and laypeople alike — the Myanmar blood bank reduced the transmission of HIV, hepatitis B and C and syphilis through blood transfusions by 80 percent over the past 10 years and earned an award from the International Blood Transfusion Society in June.

The new government, which came to power in 2011, has started placing more importance on blood transfusions, said the National Blood Center’s Aung.

But even with foreign help, funding is still difficult to find. “In our country we have to use the most cost-effective test-kit system,” she added. “With our limited resources, our patients can get reasonably safe blood transfusions.”

And make no mistake: Blood-borne diseases like hepatitis B and C are common here. Doctors here avoid blood transfusions if they can. And anyone who can afford it will hop an airplane to neighboring Bangkok or Singapore, where modern medical care and facilities await.

But in a country where per capita GDP is about $1,126, the vast majority of people requiring a blood transfusion have no other option than arranging a donation from a relative or a monk or going to the national blood bank.

Volunteer donor groups increasingly play a large role in blood donations, with employees from the local supermarkets and members of the police force coming in for recent blood drives. But monks remain among the country’s most prominent group of blood donors. At the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University, the venerable Maghava, a 37-year-old monk, keeps a book noting the blood types of all students. One monk has given more than 90 times, he said. “There are at least 300 monks ready to donate blood if you want.”

Increasingly, monks are also the go-to people for organ donations, as Myint Lwin, a pediatrician at Parami Hospital and director of Golden Zaneka Public Company, a health-care firm, knows all too well.

Suffering from cirrhosis of the liver in 2011, he was told he needed a transplant — a procedure not available in Myanmar. He found a monk who traveled with him to a clinic in neighboring India and donated part of his liver.

“Most of the transplant cases now, donors are monks. They are very willing to donate their organs,” Myint Lwin says. “It is the most powerful, and best, donation.”