There Is An Urgent Need For Mixed Race Bone Marrow Donors

The number of interracial couples in the U.S. grew from 28% in just 10 years and that number keeps growing. The Hispanic community leads the way in interracial couples with a whopping 45% of such partnerships. It’s great news that more people are accepting of interracial couples, but medically speaking it can create a problem.

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Sophia Trujillo is a 6 year old that is need of a bone marrow transplant as soon as possible. She suffers from severe aplastic anemia, which is a deficiency of all types of blood cells caused by failure of bone marrow development, so a bone marrow is needed urgently. The problem is that she is of mixed heritage: Filipino, Spanish, Irish and Italian and finding a perfect bone marrow donor is extremely difficult.

Compared to organ transplants, bone marrow donations need to be even more genetically similar to their recipients. This is why Sophia is having such a difficult time finding a bone marrow transplant. She needs to find a donor that matches her same ethnic background. All the immune system’s cells come from bone marrow, so a transplant introduces a new immune system to a person. Without the genetic similarity, the new white blood cells will attack the recipient’s body.

The simple thing would be to get a bone marrow transplant from a family member, right? No exactly, because even within our own family members, the chance of finding a perfect match are only about 30%. The sad part is that people of mixed race have a 1 in 4 chance of finding a match.

Sophia and her family have started a social media campaign to get the word out. The hastag #Swab4Sophia is not only helping Sophia find a donor, but also raising awareness about mixed race bone marrow donations. In the U.S.  National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) less than 3% of donors identify themselves as mixed race.

Becoming a bone marrow donor is an easy process. The NMDP encourages people ages 16-44 to join the Be The Match registry. They will send you a kit where you will swab your cheek and once you send the kit back to them they will put you on the list to be a bone marrow donor. About 1 in 540 members of Be The Match Registry will go on to donate bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells. This is why these registries are so important because they give hope to patients that need them.

When you become a bone marrow transplant donor, it’s something similar to a blood donation, except it takes 5 hours. The blood that is extracted from one arm into a machine separates the cells that the recipient needs, the remaining blood is returned through the other arm. Sometimes a surgery is performed to extract liquid marrow from the back of a pelvic bone, but it’s done with a local anesthetic.

It may seem like a scary process, but it’s definitely worth it when you can potentially save someone’s life.

NEXT: When a Blood Transfusion Hits Close to Home