Doctors have found a unique blood type named EMM negative blood group for the first time, which cannot be categorized into the existing groups of ‘A,’ ‘B,’ ‘O’, or ‘AB.’ The blood group has been found in a 65-year-old man from Gujarat who is a heart patient. The new group, found in India, is also the rarest worldwide. There are four types of blood groups in the human body, which further consist of 42 types of systems, like A, B, O, Rh, and Duffy in general. There are also 375 types of antigens in which EMM is high. However, only ten such people worldwide do not have EMM high-frequency antigen in their blood, which makes them different from normal humans. People with such rarest blood groups can neither donate their blood to anyone nor can they acquire it from anyone. Reports said that there were only nine people in the world with such rarest blood group, but now, a 65-year-old man from Gujarat’s Rajkot has been identified with the said blood group. Sanmukh Joshi, a doctor at Samarpan Blood Donation Center, Surat, said that the 65-year-old patient who had been undergoing treatment in Ahmedabad after suffering a heart attack needed blood for heart surgery. "But it was when his blood type was not found in the Prathama Laboratory of Ahmedabad that the samples were sent to the blood donation centre in Surat," he said. After examination, the sample did not match with any group, following which blood samples of the elderly man along with his relatives were sent to America for investigation, he said. "Subsequently, it was found that the elderly man's blood type was India's first and world's tenth such case of the rarest blood group," the doctor added. Due to the lack of EMM in the blood, the International Society of Blood Transfusion (ISBT) has named it EMM negative.
