Blood binds volunteer to people in need

An individual can donate blood only once every six months and platelets every four weeks, he notes, so such a network of available donors is essential.

On Sept 11, 2011, a passenger bus collided with the back of a vehicle transporting cement in Ma'anshan, causing nine deaths and 27 injuries.

From 4 pm to 9 pm, Fu called all the volunteer donors of the association. Although it happened to be the Mid-Autumn Festival, an important time of family reunions, 88 volunteers arrived and donated 26 liters of blood for victims undergoing surgery.

Emergencies have moved Fu to donate blood far beyond Ma'anshan.

A month after the 7.0-magnitude Ya'an earthquake in Sichuan in April 2013, Fu was on loan to the Sichuan office of the newly established China Nonprofit Network of Disaster Risk Management from his company in Ma'anshan. On World Blood Donor Day on June 14, he donated 400 milliliters of blood in Ya'an.

While there, he visited all the villages in the quake zone to find out which projects were needed so that special funds could be channeled there, says Zhang Jianhui, executive secretary-general of the network.

Since the founding of the association, Fu and nearly 300 member donors have donated 1,800 liters of blood, accounting for 1/16th of blood for clinical use in Ma'anshan.

"Nine of them have managed to donate hematopoietic stem cells to leukemia patients. That's quite significant as hematopoietic stem cell transplant is the only way to cure the disease and it is rare for the hematopoietic stem cell of a donor to match that of a patient who is not his or her relative," Fu says.