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China Seek Donors to Narrow Bone Marrow(骨髓)Gap
China has launched a campaign to recruit more bone marrow donors, amid a shortage of funds as well as of sibling donors who could help the growing number of patients in need of life-saving transplants, state media reported on Monday.
The Chinese Red Cross began the national campaign over the weekend to find donors for some 4 million patients suffering from leukaemia (白血病), thalassanemia (地中海贫血) and other blood diseases and awaiting bone marrow transplants, the official China Daily said. Every year China has 40,000 new leukaemia patients, most of them under 35 and 50 per cent of them children, the newspaper said. Other reports have linked China"s growing childhood leukaemia to solvents and building materials used in interior decoration.
With a tiny pool of bone marrow donors, weakened by the absence of sibling donors for most children because of China"s one-child policy, doctors rely on donors from Taiwan to save many young leukaemia patients, the Belling Evening News said last weekend. Tatwan, with a population of 22 million, has 210,000 registered donors compared with fewer than 30,000 donors among mainland China"s 1.3 billion people, the newspaper said.
Yet the lack of registered donors may reflect a lack of funding for testing and recording data on potential donors rather than a lack of volunteers, the newspaper said. China needs a pool of at least 100,000 donors but testing them would cost more than 50 million yuan (6 million dollars), it said.
The Hong Kong Marrow Match Foundation said it has helped "a handful" of patients in Beijing, Shanghai and other cities. "The number of requests is increasing" from mainland China, including direct calls to the charity from desperate patients or relatives, said the foundation"s donor coordinator Marven Chin. But the cost of extracting bone marrow from one of the foundation"s 40,000 registered donors and flying it by courier has to be borne by the patients, and many of them have to be aided financially, Chin said.