When it comes to curing diseases like leukemia, race matters. About 30% of patients who need bone marrow get it from relatives. The other 70% of donations come from people who are registered in bone marrow registries like The Gift of Life or the BeTheMatch registry. However, patients are most likely to match with those in their own ethnic/racial group; and currently, minorities are significantly underrepresented in the registries, with the result that a black, Latino, Native American, or Asian child needing a transplant to live has a less than 18% chance of finding a match. A white child would have an 85% chance of finding a match.
Even 85% is not enough. Anyone who would be willing to donate bone marrow to save someone’s life should register, regardless of their ethnicity. But obviously, it is especially crucial to spread the word about donation in minority populations.
These statistics can change. In 1991, a 23-year-old Jewish man named Jay Feinberg was diagnosed with leukemia. At the time, the chance of a Jewish person finding a match in the national donor registry was close to zero. Jay’s friends and family began a massive campaign to register Jewish donors, resulting in the Gift of Life Foundation, which shares databases with the National Marrow Donor Program. After four years, a donor was finally found for Jay – not at a drive he had sponsored, but at a drive sponsored by the friend of another man who had found a donor through Gift of Life. A woman named Becky donated marrow and saved Jay’s life, and today Jay runs the Gift of Life Foundation, which has expanded to serve the general population.
Swab a Cheek, Save a Life is an independently funded campaign of the Gift of Life Foundation. Its goal is to do what Gift of Life did for Jewish patients, and change the odds for other patients of diverse backgrounds.
It costs between $50 to $100 to process a donor sample. Currently, except in three states that require insurance to cover it, this cost must be born by either the foundations or the donors themselves. As a result, Gift of Life currently has over 13,000 samples unprocessed. Someone’s life-saving match could be sitting in a box, unusable due to lack of funds.
Half the auctions will be for donations to Gift of Life to process current samples, and half for Swab a Cheek to recruit and process new samples from underrepresented populations.
It costs between $50 to $100 to process a donor sample. Currently, except in three states that require insurance to cover it, this cost must be born by either the foundations or the donors themselves. As a result, Gift of Life currently has over 13,000 samples unprocessed. Someone’s life-saving match could be sitting in a box, unusable due to lack of funds.
Half the auctions will be for donations to Gift of Life to process current samples, and half for Swab a Cheek to recruit and process new samples from underrepresented populations.
