Imagine having a blood type so rare that only two other people in the entire world could match it. That’s the reality for three individuals uncovered in a recent study based in Thailand – and they were discovered almost by accident. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

“We conducted a retrospective review of 285,450 donor and 258,780 patient samples for ABO discrepancies,” write the team, making an impressive total of more than half a million participants. And how many did they find? Fewer than 400 discrepancies – and just three lone cases of the new blood type, labelled B(A).

So, uh, here’s a question: what does all that mean?

The ABOs of blood

Blood typing is a finicky thing. For a long time, we didn’t have any idea it

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