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March 9, 2007 Vol. 77,
no. 8S
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| EASY
AND PAINLESS: ME Ph.D. student
Adrienne Higa finishes her cheek swab during a recent bone
marrow drive.
RACHEL SHAFER PHOTO
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Eng. staff and students organize bone marrow drive
Event targets minority students in north side
community
With his forms filled out and cheek swab complete,
ME Ph.D. student Peter Yang registered to become a bone marrow donor
during a campus registration drive held on February 28 and March 1.
About 220 people, many of them engineers, registered, making it the
most successful marrow drive in recent campus memory.
While marrow drives come here once a year or so, the recent drive featured
for the first time a north side location at Bechtel Engineering Center,
thanks to the efforts of College student affairs officer Eugenia Guruwaya-Foon.
Guruwaya-Foon knows many engineers are Asian or Asian American, ethnicities
that are sorely underrepresented in the national bone marrow donor
registry. And that worries her.
Three years ago, her Chinese-American brother-in-law was diagnosed
with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a cancer that attacks the immune system.
Aggressive chemo- and radiation therapy didn’t stabilize the
cancer, and he faced a last resort option: a bone marrow transplant,
which, if successful, would effectively give him a new immune system.
When siblings didn’t have a tissue match, he turned to the National
Marrow Donor Program Registry to locate a donor of Chinese or Chinese-American
descent. Last week, he learned that he’d been matched.
Guruwaya-Foon, who is herself registered, hopes to replicate the good
news with this drive. “If we could find just one match from those
who sign up today, I would be thrilled.”
Organizers say that the most difficult part of the drive is demystifying
the process. Unlike blood drives, you don’t donate marrow right
away, just register. The registration process includes filling out
a short health questionnaire and consent form and providing several
cheek swabs. The cheek swab is used to determine your human leukocyte
antigen (HLA) type. If your HLA matches a patient, you will be called
for additional testing. Actual marrow donation occurs 30 percent of
the time.
ME Ph.D. student Adrienne Higa says she’s wanted to register
in the past but was deterred by giving a finger-prick blood sample,
the previous method of determining HLA type. The cheek swab was easy
and painless, she says, and she convinced Yang, her lab mate, to register,
too. The process took only 15 minutes.
The Engineers’ Joint Council (EJC) sponsored the drive with Alpha
Phi Omega, the American Medical Students Association, the Mixed Student
Union and the Thai Students Association. Representing the latter, ME
graduate student Supone Mana-kasettharn registered and volunteered
at the Bechtel location, greeting people, explaining forms and helping
with cheek swabs. Fellow volunteer Wayne Feng, an IEOR/Economics junior
and EJC officer, also registered. “If I actually donate marrow,
it might be slightly uncomfortable for a little while, but it’s
nothing compared to what the sick person is feeling,” he says. “It’s
worth my time.”
If you missed the drive, you can register online. Contact the Asian
American Donor Program at www.aadp.org or the National Marrow Donor
Program at www.marrow.org.
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