EDITORIAL: The need is great for bone marrow donors EDITORIAL: The need is great for bone marrow donors (August 03, 2005)

It's always a tragedy when the life of someone young and promising is cut short, no matter what the circumstances. It's hard to view the recent death of 29-year-old Heather Lynch of Ladera as anything other than heart-wrenching. Suffering from leukemia, her only hope was a bone marrow transplant. After a long struggle to find a compatible donor, she was on the cusp of getting that transplant when the donor had to pull out for medical reasons.

Although Heather didn't survive, her efforts to find a bone marrow donor may have already helped save the life of another cancer patient. One of the people who rallied to support Heather by joining the national bone marrow registry got the call last month to donate.

"Maybe he wasn't able to help Heather, but he was able to save someone else, hopefully," said Derek Leith, the director of Stanford Blood Center's marrow donor program.

Donated bone marrow, the spongy inner tissue of bones where blood cells are made, must closely match the recipient's own in order to be transplanted successfully. There's a one-in-30,000 chance that one person's bone marrow is a match for anyone else's, according to Mr. Leith. Matches are most often found among people of similar racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Because most of the potential marrow donors on the national registry are white, the chances of finding a donor can be very slim for anyone who isn't white.

There's an easy way to increase those odds, and that is for everyone eligible to join the National Marrow Donor Program to do so. There are a lot of ways to contribute to cancer research -- from participating in a walkathon to buying a LiveStrong bracelet -- but joining the marrow donor registry is doubtlessly one of the most personal, and potentially one of the most immediate, ways to make a difference in a cancer patient's life.

And, it's free. While some organizations charge potential donors $100 or more to cover the cost of testing blood samples and determining the tissue type, for Midpeninsula residents, it's as simple as donating a pint of blood to the Stanford Blood Center. Stanford does not charge donors for the testing.

Potential bone marrow donors must be between the ages of 18 and 60, and in good health. But most importantly, they have to be willing to make a commitment to undergo a marrow donation procedure if they one day get the call. The two types of marrow donation procedures are no walk in the park, but sacrificing a few days' discomfort for the opportunity to help save a life is an easy choice to make.

The old adage "Think globally, act locally" may be a product of the environmental movement, but it holds true for bone marrow donors as well. The national registry, with nearly 6 million potential donors, is part of a worldwide network of almost 11 million registered donors. Bone marrow donated at Stanford has been used to help patients close to home and on the other side of the world. Cancer does not discriminate on the basis of national borders, religious ideologies or political differences, and neither does the anonymous donor registry.

To set up an appointment to join the national marrow registry, call the Stanford Marrow Donor Program at 723-5532. A pre-screening interview can be done over the phone, and appointments to come in are available six days a week.

A wealth of information about the registry, marrow donation procedures and requirements for becoming a donor is available on the Web. Good sites include the National Marrow Donor Program's marrow.org and Stanford's site, bloodcenter.Stanford.edu. A nonprofit organization, Can Do Coalition, uses the Internet to encourage people to donate to bone-marrow, stem-cell and cord-blood registries. Brett Hine, the son of Almanac managing editor Richard Hine, is the executive director. The Web site is CanDoCoalition.org

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