“Demand for living donors growing”
By Anne Geggis
NEWS-JOURNALONLINE.COM
A total stranger could save Barry Sror’s life in about one hour.
The 46-year-old Ormond Beach businessman and father of one has leukemia. His best hope for getting cured would be transplanting someone’s bone marrow to him, so that his diseased blood essentially would be replaced by the donor’s.
Such a transplant once required the donor to visit a hospital for bone marrow to be drawn out of the pelvic bone — a painful and time-consuming procedure that required anesthesia and a few days’ recovery. But since the late 1990s, new discoveries have made the donation almost as simple as giving blood.
The need for living donors has never been more critical. Figures from the United Network of Organ Sharing show the number waiting for organ transplants has increased 23 percent since 2003. While they wait, about 8,000 will die or become too sick for a transplant. There are currently 113,062 waiting for a vital organ, and 70 percent of those who have a disease like Sror’s don’t have a family member with compatible bone marrow.
So Sror, whose friends are organizing bone-marrow donor drives in the area this week, wants to take his appeal to get more signed up in the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be the Match Registry.
“This is something that is very simple and people don’t know about it,” Sror said in a telephone interview from Houston, where he’s receiving treatment from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. “I didn’t know about it until I got sick.”
To register potential bone-marrow donors, the inside cheek is swabbed so the tissue can be tested for the markers that determine who the donor is compatible with. The results are stored in the national registry.
Dr. Tisha Foster, medical director of Florida’s Blood Centers, said the variety of diseases that can be treated through this sort of donation is expanding to include even sickle cell anemia. So that makes it even more urgent that more ethnic minorities join in registering as donors; African-Americans now have only a 60 percent chance of having a bone-marrow match, compared with an 88 percent chance for Caucasians.
Sror, who is from Israel, just needs one person, the right person, to come forward.
“If I have the transplant,” he said, “I have a very, very good chance of getting cured.”
He tries not to think of the alternative.
Meanwhile, here are the ways healthy people can help those who need donations:
KIDNEYS
Account for the largest number of organs needed, with 86,000 needing kidneys among the 111,000 registered for a transplant. The need is so severe that so-called “kidney swaps” have been done starting in 2000. In a swap, incompatible donor-recipient pairs are matched with other pairs of donor-recipients facing a similar challenge.
Donating a kidney can be harder for the donor than the recipient, who often experiences immediate relief from kidney-failure symptoms. The donor, on the other hand, needs two or three weeks’ recovery time.
LIVER
About 17,000 people are registered for the organ that serves as the body’s filter and digestion aid. A sliver of a living person’s liver was first given to a child successfully in the late 1980s and adult-to-adult liver transplants soon followed.
A donor can expect to be in the intensive care unit for about 24 hours after the operation and hospitalized for an additional five to seven days. It’s usually necessary to stay out of work and not do usual home activities for a month.
BONE MARROW
First performed in 1978, this transplant essentially replaces the blood-making factory in the body for recipients who have a blood disease, such as leukemia.
In the late 1990s, the procedure began to move away from extracting bone marrow from the hip and instead harvested peripheral blood stem cells in a procedure similar to giving blood plasma. That method now represents about 80 percent of the bone-marrow transplant procedures.
Five days before the donation, the patient receives daily injections of a drug that moves blood-forming cells out of the marrow and into the bloodstream. The blood is removed through a needle in one arm and passed through a machine that separates out the blood-forming cells.
Even simpler: Cord blood harvested at the time of a baby’s birth now accounts for 20 percent of bone-marrow donations.
BLOOD
Donors can give up to a pint of blood in about a half-hour. According to the latest numbers from the American Association of Blood Banks, nearly 9.6 million people gave 15.7 million pints in 2006, but the demand remains great.
MULTI-ORGAN
Untimely deaths, such as car accident victims, often have the greatest potential to leave behind lifesaving organs, including hearts, pancreas, small bowels, eyes, corneas, heart valves, bones and skin grafts. But it’s estimated that 20,000 transplantable organs that could have been harvested were buried or cremated.
To be a donor visit donatelifeflorida.org or call 877-357-4273 to request a registry form. A national network for organ donation, Life Sharers, tries to motivate people to sign up to donate their organs at death by promising that anyone who signs up will have access to the organs that come to their network. More information is available at lifesharers.org or by calling 888-674-2688.
Bone-marrow registry drive
You might be a lifesaver for someone you don’t even know. In honor of Ormond Beach resident Barry Sror, who needs a bone-marrow transplant, three drives to register people on the National Marrow Donor Program’s Be the Match Registry have been organized:
· 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Wednesday, Chabad Lubavitch of Greater Daytona, 1079 Granada Blvd., Ormond Beach. Phone: 386-672-9300.
· 2 to 6 p.m. Wednesday, 4Ever Fitness, 4639 S. Clyde Morris Blvd., No. 10, Port Orange. Phone: 386-788-5678.
· 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Palmer College of Chiropractic Clinic (at the back of the clinic), 4705 S. Clyde Morris Blvd., Port Orange. Phone: 386-763-2630.
Local kidney transplants to resume
After 10 months of inactivity, Halifax Health’s kidney-transplant program is poised to resume, with a surgical director starting there Aug. 24. Dr. Rod Mateo comes to Halifax after working as a multiple-organ transplant surgeon at the University of Southern California for 11 years.
Halifax’s first try last year at opening a kidney transplant center — replacing one that shut down at Bert Fish Medical Center in New Smyrna Beach in 2005 — proved a false start, with just four transplants performed in the new center’s six months.
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Member, Board of Directors of OPTN/UNOS (General Public Representative – Living Donor, 2008-2011) and Executive Committee, 2009-2010
Invited Attendee to the OPTN/UNOS Kidney Transplantation Committee while on the board
Member of the Editorial Board of the UNOS Foundation’s http://www.transplantliving.org/, 2005 to present, and the NKF Transplant Chronicles, 2009.
Living kidney donor, 2003
297 whole blood and platelet pheresis donations & counting, 1976-present,
Please consider yourself asked! Sign up to donate blood today at http://redcross.org/donate/give/ or call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE (1-800-448-3543). Thanks!