Latino bone marrow donors wanted

Donor program reaching out to Latino community
By J.M. Brown Correspondent 01/22/2009

The Alameda-based Asian American Donor Program is expanding its outreach to the Latino community in order to give Hispanic people greater access to bone marrow matches.

The organization, which was founded 20 years ago to encourage more Asian Americans to register on the national bone marrow database, decided to create a Latino Outreach Program after 24-year-old leukemia patient Jose Ochoa contacted the group for help in August. The Asian American Donor Program had helped other Latino patients in the past, but realized a need to serve the nation's growing Hispanic population.

Patients needing bone marrow transplants can only be matched with donors of the same or similar ethnic makeup, creating a need for ethnic minorities and multi-ethnic people to donate. As of September, only 5.3 percent of donors on the national registry identified as people of Hispanic origin, compared to 73 percent Caucasian.

To celebrate the public service aspect of Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Tuesday's inauguration of Barack Obama, the Asian American Donor Program hosted donor drives in Oakland.

Ramona Garcia, who the group recently hired to conduct its Latino Outreach Program, was at the drives to help Latinos understand why their help is so critical.

There are several cultural barriers to getting more Latino people to donate, Garcia said. There is some distrust of medical providers and concern among undocumented donors that providing
identification information may lead trouble with authorities.

"There area lot of myths people have about surgery "... because people have their own ways of remedy and illness and solutions to it," Garcia said. "It's really about bringing awareness to the community and informing people." Stem cells can be used to treat 167 kinds of blood diseases, from leukemia to lymphoma. Registering on the donor list requires filling out a medical survey and taking four cheek swabs. Donors are asked to extract stem cells only if there is a match. The recipient's health insurance or the national donor program will cover the cost of the procedure.

For information, contact Garcia at the AADP at 800-593-6667, visit the center at 2169 Harbor Bay Parkway, Alameda, or log on to www.aadp.org.

Contact J.M. Brown at jammbrow@yahoo.com.