The world’s 10th person with the rarest blood group has been found in India. This is the first time that this group has been identified in the country.

The 65-year-old man who is from Rajkot, Gujarat, is a heart patient has been found to be having EMM negative blood group – a singularly distinct group – that can’t be categorised as A, B, O or AB.

The human body has four types of blood groups which have 42 types of systems namely A, B, O, Rh, etc. Further, there are also 375 types of antigens in which EMM is high.

Believe it or not, there are only 10 people in the world who do not have EMM high-frequency antigen in their blood – making them different from others.

These people with this rarest blood group can neither donate blood nor can they receive it from anyone.

When this patient suffered a heart attack and required blood for his surgery, his blood type had to be identified. According to Sanmukh Joshi, a doctor at Surat’s Samarpan Blood Donation Centre the patient’s blood type was not found in the Prathama Laboratory of Ahmedabad and so the samples were sent to the blood donation centre in Surat.

As the sample did not match with any group, the elderly patient’s samples and that of his relatives have been sent to the United States for further study.