Song for Blood Donor's Recruitment and Promotion during COVID-19 Pandemic.

Songs are commonly used in educational public health programmes to facilitate the understanding of health messages. During the COVID-19 pandemic, national blood banks witnessed a pronounced reduction in blood donors. Thus, we created a song with the title 'Keep the World Beating' to raise awareness of the need for blood and to promote blood donation. To maximise participation, we carried out a live broadcast of the donation process and the music video on social media, increasing visibility and accessibility to the event. The number of donations increased in the month after the song was released. Songs can be used to strengthen current entertainment-education strategies promoting blood donation and to increase the level of awareness among the local population, thus motivating people to donate blood in a time of need.

Development and Validation of a Malaysian Blood Donor's Satisfaction Questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE: To develop and validate a questionnaire which evaluates the blood donors' satisfaction. BACKGROUND: In Malaysia, blood procurement relies mainly on voluntary non-remunerated donors. Hence, it is important to ensure the satisfaction of the blood donors in order to increase retention. METHODS: This study was conducted among blood donors who attended blood donation and understood the Malay language. Non-Malaysian and illiterate donors were excluded. The questionnaire was developed by the transfusion medicine team. Content validity was established by content reviewers, while face validity was examined in the cognitive debriefing stage. For the 18-item questionnaire, 90 respondents were required based on the 1:5 ratio. A retest was performed in two weeks' time. RESULTS: One hundred and thirty-seven participants responded in the first phase, while 103 responded after two weeks. The five domains were: technical, interpersonal, accessibility/ convenience, physical experience and overall satisfaction. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) value was 0.896, with significant Bartlett's Test of Sphericity (P < 0.001). The factor loadings ranged from 0.729 to 0.953. The Cronbach alpha values of the five domains ranged from 0.814 to 0.955 and the intraclass correlation coefficient ranged from 0.663 to 0.847. CONCLUSION: The Malaysian blood donor's satisfaction (M-BDS) questionnaire is a reliable and valid tool suitable for the assessment of blood donor's satisfaction in blood donation centres.

The Potential of ß Carbolin Alkaloids to Hinder Growth and Reverse Chloroquine Resistance in Plasmodium falciparum.

BACKGROUND: Nowadays, scourge of malaria as a fatalistic disease has increased due to emergence of drug resistance and tolerance among different strains of Plasmodium falciparum. Emergence of chloroquine (CQ) resistance has worsened the calamity as CQ is still considered the most efficient, safe and cost effective drug among other antimalarials. This urged the scientists to search for other alternatives or sensitizers that may be able to augment CQ action and reverse its resistance. METHOD: Three ß-carbolin derivatives, namely, harmalin, harmol and harmalol were tested for their anti-plasmodial and CQ resistance reversal effects against P. falciparum 3D7 and K1. SYBRE Green-1 based drug sensitivity assay and isobologram analysis were used to screen the mentioned effects respectively. RESULTS: All of them showed moderate anti-plasmodium effect and harmalin was the most effective as compared to the others in reversing CQ resistance and tolerance. CONCLUSION: The mentioned phytochemicals are not ideal to be used as conventional antimalarials and only harmalin can be suggested to reverse CQ resistance in P. falciparum K1.