Project targets ethnic groups and young people
Pamela Fayerman, Sun Health Issues Reporter-Vancouver Sun-Monday, March 03, 2008
VANCOUVER – A B.C. pilot project using free, Web mail-order cheek swab kits to recruit young and ethnically diverse bone marrow stem cell donors, is being deemed such a whopping success that it’s now being rolled out across the country.
Ethnic groups are being targeted because 85 per cent of would-be donors in the bone marrow registry are Caucasian, which makes it highly difficult to find matches for ethnic patients. Younger donors are sought because they are the healthiest.
The national program follows a Canadian Blood Services (CBS) project over the past four months in B.C., during which cheek swab kits were mailed to those between the ages of 17 and 50 after they registered for them online.
The kits contain long sticks resembling Q-tips to scrape skin cells from the inside of cheeks. The kit is sent back to CBS in Ottawa; the individual’s DNA is then extracted, typed and entered in a database.
Before the cheek swab kits were introduced, would-be donors had to go to a laboratory for a blood draw, a far more expensive, inconvenient process. Now the cheek swab kits will largely replace laboratory blood collection for DNA typing.
Two young, ethnic Vancouver residents who registered as would-be donors are Alykhan Sumar and his fiance, Salima Versi.
“We’re Ismaili and it’s part of our religion to do community service and such things as give blood so we joined after we saw the advertising,” said the 23-year-old Sumar, in an interview.
“We felt compelled to go online to get the kits and we sent them back about six weeks ago. The instructions for collecting the cells was very easy to understand and the whole process takes only about three minutes, We feel very comfortable about the prospect of giving stem cells in our blood or bone marrow,” he said.
Sumar and Versi, also 23, are two of the 1,100 altruistic B.C. residents who have joined the database since a media marketing campaign last fall that featured advertising targeted to certain groups.
CREDIT: Ward Perrin/Vancouver Sun Alykhan Sumar and Salima Versi have registered as bone marrow donors. They see it as a way of giving back to their community.
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