Cancer fight puts focus on lack of minorities on stem-cell donor lists

Periodically, articles emerge regarding the need for more donors from minority communities (e.g., Asian British Columbians less likely to be organ donors). This latest, thanks to a social media campaign launched by Mai Duong, a leukaemia patient in Montreal, pertains to the need for stem cell donations, used to transplant new immune systems to patients with a range of blood-related cancers.

Having benefitted from a stem cell donation to treat my lymphoma, and without the challenges of finding a donor given my European ancestry (my donor turned out to be a nice young German man), I can only urge those of you of whatever extraction to consider donating stem cells. The Canadian link is OneMatch Stem Cell and Marrow Network, in Quebec, Héma-Québec:

But Duong, 34, has discovered that locating the right person can be a needle-in-a-haystack challenge, particularly for those who are from a non-Caucasian background.

“This is a global problem,” Duong, who is of Vietnamese origin, said in an interview from her room at Montreal’s Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital.

“We can’t do a scavenger hunt every time someone has this type of problem.”

…. Canada Blood Services, which manages the stem cell and marrow registry outside Quebec, says 340,837 people are currently registered in the rest of the country. Of them, 71 per cent are Caucasian, with the rest qualifying as “ethnically diverse” or of unknown origin.

Hema-Quebec, the organization that manages the province’s list, says about three per cent of the 47,000 stem-cell donors are of Asian descent and only a fraction of those are Vietnamese. The ratios are similar among international donors and Vietnam doesn’t have a registry of its own.

Cancer fight puts focus on lack of minorities on stem-cell donor lists.