As a nursing school student in Cameroon, Melissa Bime remembers watching helplessly as a mother struggled to find a blood match for her 5-year-old daughter, Rita. After three days of fruitless searching, Rita died. A week later, Bime discovered that a hospital 20 minutes away had had the right blood all along. “At the time I didn’t think much of it,” says Bime, 22. “I was too used to seeing people die.”
Rita’s death may be a tragic statistic, but thanks to Infiuss — the online blood bank Bime started in December 2017 — there is now hope for residents of Cameroon’s two largest cities. In the year since its launch, Infiuss’ motorbikes have delivered more than 2,300 bags of blood (sourced from three existing blood banks) to patients at 23 hospitals in Yaoundé and Douala. In 2019, Bime hopes to “double or even triple” these numbers, while also expanding to other cities in Cameroon and leveraging Infiuss’ database of donors to establish a physical blood bank owned by Infiuss.
“Access to blood before Infiuss was a dilemma for both physicians and patients,” says Dr. Iddi Faisal, a GP in Yaoundé who has used Bime’s service dozens of times. Cameroon doesn’t just have a shortage of blood (according to the Ministry of Public Health only 90,000 pints are donated annually, far short of the 400,000 required) but there is “no data” on existing blood stocks, says Faisal. “Infiuss changes lives,” he stresses.
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