Hospitals in the capital of Southwest China's Yunnan province have been forced to postpone 90 percent of surgeries due to an unprecedented shortage of blood, the city's health authorities said on Monday.

As of now, Kunming has a stock of 20,000 milliliters of blood, far short of the minimum storage requirement of 400,000 ml for the city, which is home to more than 6 million people.

"This is the city's greatest shortage of donated blood in a decade and many local blood banks have run dry," Li Kaihong, a division director at the Kunming Blood Center, told China Daily.

Like many other parts of China, the city mainly relies on college students and migrant workers for blood donations, she said.

Li said Kunming started running short of blood after many local universities and colleges moved their campuses to a new district in the city's suburbs, where there are no blood collection stations.

The Kunming Blood Center will soon open new blood donation outlets near the new district in an attempt to ease the severe crisis, she said, adding the center will also dispatch vehicles to subordinate counties to foster a more diversified pool of blood donors.

Li urged the city's public to come forward to donate blood, saying the center is unable to meet a daily blood requirement of around 150,000 ml.

On an average, the center is only able to collect 100,000 ml each day, she said.

In a bid to encourage people to donate blood, the center is giving away two free movie tickets to the first 10 donors every day till Oct 28.

"The number of donors has increased from an average of 30 to more than 100 this week," said a worker, surnamed Li, at a blood collection station on Nanping Street.

Several donors, many of whom came after reading reports of the blood shortage, stood in line in the rain to donate blood, he said.

"I heard (of the blood shortage) on the news and came to help," said Fan Qingyun, a migrant worker from the neighboring Sichuan province.

More than 99 percent of clinical blood supplies in the mainland comes from voluntary donors, according to the Ministry of Health.

(China Daily October 26, 2010)