Health and Family Welfare Minister Damodar Rout on Saturday strongly advocated for creation of a skin bank to ensure better treatment of burn victims while expressing concern that the number of such cases is on the rise due to social conflicts.
As the chosen methods of acute burn management are excision and skin grafting, harvesting of skin and its preservation has become the crying need, he said while inaugurating a National Seminar on Burns at the Institute of Medical Sciences and Sum Hospital here. The seminar was conducted in association with the National Academy of Burns, India (NABI).
Dr Rout said that with the mindset of the people changing, it would not be difficult for them to agree to skin donation.Many people in Odisha are coming forward now for whole body donation for scientific research after death, he said.
While a few people were coming forward to donate blood in the past, the scenario has undergone a change with more young men and women willing to do so today, he pointed out. “While the State’s annual requirement is 3.50 lakh units of blood, 3.07 lakh units have been collected till now and the target will be reached by March next,” he said.
He said from his experience that he has come across a case in New Delhi when skin was donated by a young man who died in an accident and it benefitted as many as 14 burn victims.
Dr Prabhat Shrivastava, Senior Plastic Surgeon at the lok Nayak Hospital and Maulana Azad Medical College, New Delhi said the number of burn accidents is second only to road mishaps while fire accidents are endemic to the Indian sub-continent.
As a vast majority of burn victims in the country are managed by general surgeons, the latter need to be trained up in burn care, he said.Vice-Chancellor of SOA University Prof RP Mohanty, who presided over the meeting, stressed on primary care of burn victims as it matters the most.