More Asian Pacific Americans are needed to donate bone marrow, a fact which has put many APAs who need marrow transplants at a disadvantage when looking for potential matches.
According to the National Marrow Donor Program,bone marrow transplant patients, regardless of ethnicity, already only have a 30 percent chance of having matching bone marrow types with a relative. The rest must find matches through the NMDP’s registry.
From there, it gets even more difficult for APA patients, as their chances of finding a match are comparatively lower than a Caucasian’s.
According to Carol Gillespie, the Executive Director of the Asian American Donor Program (AADP), the antigens or proteins that make up bone marrow tissue are much more diverse in patients with Asian Pacific ancestry.
“The range of antigens for [APAs] is a lot larger than for [Caucasians],” Gillespie said. “There are a lot more rare types. Some are being newly discovered today.”
According to the AADP’s website, an ethnic minority has only a 30 to 40 percent chance of finding a donor from the NMDP registry. In comparison, a Caucasian person has an 80 percent chance.
Still, even with this need for new donors to diversify the NMDP’s registry, there is still a shortage of APA donors.
This absence in participation from APA citizens can be attributed to a lack of education, AADP Outreach Coordinator James de Lara said.
“They don’t know what the procedure entails,” de Lara said. “Some people we’ve come across ask if we are going to take bone from them.”
APA students at the University of Maryland agree with de Lara’s assessment on the lack of education and awareness.
Katie Kim, a freshman letters & science major who moved to America three years ago from South Korea, had constantly heard about the need for marrow donors in her home country, but said she’s heard very little about the process of becoming a donor in America.
Kirsten Lesak-Greenberg, a member of the NMDP’s media relations team, said the program is attempting to educate the public about the need and at the same time dispel potential donor’s concerns about how the marrow is removed.
“The media portrays [the procedure] as being more painful than it actually is,” she said.
One fact the NMDP is trying to communicate with potential donors is that there are actually two different procedures a person could go through when donating.
The traditional and better known method is surgical and occurs at a hospital, where a doctor will extract the liquid marrow directly from the donor’s hip bone. However, this method is now minimally used, as it is the more invasive of the two procedures and requires anesthesia.
The other, more popular method is a peripheral blood stem cell donation (PBSC). This process, which accounts for 75 percent of the NMDP’s donations, is nonsurgical and involves blood being taken from your arm and passed through a machine, which then filters out blood-forming cells to donate.
According to Lesak-Greenberg, although there is discomfort and sometimes flu-like symptoms when donating PBSC, the effects are minimal and should only last a few days.
Diane Peng, a junior environmental science major, donated bone marrow over the summer at the National Institutes of Health using the PBSC method to donate.
“I signed up at a fun run just because,” Peng said. “I never knew I would be a match.”
Peng was a match for an older Asian woman. Although the procedure was long and uncomfortable at times, she said the experience was worth it because she was saving someone’s life.
“They just kept repeating to me ‘you’re doing a great thing,’ and I really felt like I was,” Peng said. “And the World Cup was on so I just got to watch soccer all day so it was bearable.”
Still, many students are concerned about registering to donate. Joon Lee, a freshman engineering major, and Grace Kim, freshman letters and sciences major, both said they would only donate bone marrow to family members because they are fearful of the pain that comes with the procedure to donate.
“[APAs] are very big about family, but not community stuff,” Lee said. “What affects what’s near us is what we care about.”
This cultural concern with family over the larger regional community, students said, could be another reason there is a lack of donations from the different APA communities.
“Massive Asian communities are very closed,” Peishi Li, a senior economics major, said. “They are not good with welfare and community service.”
Li, who moved here from China in 2001, said he believes a change is needed in this thinking.
“Family should be the whole community and society, not just the nuclear family,” he said.
