Taking Action Can Save a Life The National Marrow Donor Progam is worldwide hub connected to over 500 cancer treatment facilities and possessing a vast database of t donor issue types which doctors comb through to find bone marrow matches for patients with deadly diseases like leukemia. The current odds of finding a bone marrow match for white people are not high, but the odds are even worse for African American, Hispanics, Asians, Pacific Islanders,and Native Americans because the National Marrow Donor Program's web databases contain very few people of color in their database. Recently, I learned how amazing this donor process is, how easy, how safe, and how needed donors are - especially donors of color. According to the National Marrow Donor Program website " a pressing need remains for more people who identify themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or multiple-race to volunteer as donors or to donate umbilical cord blood."
I recently went through the process of being tested to see if my bone marrow, already on the Marrow Donor Progran's donor registry, would be a match for a real person for whom I had popped up as a potential match. While I learned the chance of my marrow matching this patient - of anyone's marrow matching this patient- is small- only 8% of tests come back with a match- I lalso earned the odds are even tougher when the patient is a person of color. (I am caucasian...) I learned when it comes to finding matches, race and ethnicity matter. According to the site, "Because tissue types are inherited, their most likely match is with someone from the same racial or ethnic group." Perhaps if you are reading this and are African American, Asian, Pacific Islander, Hispanic, or Native American, you have considered getting on the Marrow program registry before. I hope you will change that maybe to a "I'm going this month!' or "I'm going this week!" or even just "I'll check out the website." It could be one of the best and most important decisions you ever make.
Posted By: Devon Marshall
Thursday, April 9th 2009 at 12:19PM
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