A call from hospital

"Mum, please come to me! I feel so horrible, doctors think it could be an infection and somebody has to take the blood samples to the lab... No, it's needed today... I know you are far here … my body temperature keeps increasing" – the duty nurse changing the drip systems can often witness the desperate conversations like that. It's not a new situation for Kyiv Centre of Bone Marrow Transplantation. The patients who had high-dose chemotherapy are forbidden to leave their sterile box rooms and the only thing they can do is to call someone... There are no reagents in the centre labs. They even don't have the essential ones for diagnosing the most common infections.

People from whole Ukraine come to this Centre. For them this is the only hope for survival as they have "autologous bone marrow transplantation" in their treatment protocol and you can't do it anywhere else in Ukraine. What waits for them ahead is the high-dose chemotherapy and isolation in sterile box room with glass walls. Their own immunity gets temporary destroyed by the chemotherapy and every infection can be fatal. Apart from outside infections there are chronic infections inside of the patient's bodies, even if they haven't experienced any symptoms for years...

The Centre has no reagents for diagnosing the most common infections and the patients' relatives have to take the blood samples to the private labs. The doctors in the Centre have nothing left to do but hope that the relatives will come on time to pick the samples and the results from the outside labs will be precise enough. But what to do if the patient has no relatives or friends in Kyiv? Or if different labs give different results for the same sample. Sometimes the results even don't match the symptoms.

"Sometimes we get the results from an outside lab and having hard time reading them because the lab used different measurement system. Also happens that the results look so odd that we want to double check them but it means that we have to call a family member again and ask them to take another sample to the lab. This whole process takes so much time! The time our patients usually don't have. The time is crucial – we have to diagnose them really quickly and start the treatment otherwise the death can be unavoidable. How can you do that when even the private labs charging a fortune for a test doing it 2 days minimum" – the doctors of the Centre are concerned about the situation and asking to help them renew the work of their own labs.

The kit of reagents for diagnostics of common viral infections and test tubes for automatic blood testing equipment cost 34 700 UAH. This is enough for the centre lab to work for 6 month and for doctors to be sure that their patients are under control and won't die because of slow working private labs.