Shortage of South Asian stem cell donors a concern

BY GAURAV PANDEY

Shehan Fernando, a 33-year-old man diagnosed with leukaemia - a condition that hinders the body’s production of blood cells - is in urgent need of a stem cell transplant, and his family and friends are leaving no stone unturned to find a suitable donor for

The best matches are generally the immediate family members of the patient, as they are most likely to have genetically matching tissue type. In Shehan’s case, however, none of his family members turned out to be a suitable match, necessitating the need to find an outside donor who is most likely to be a South Asian, as Shehan is of Sri Lankan ethnicity.

The family’s search for a donor was met with disappointment as they soon realised that South Asians were acutely under-represented on donor registries of the world: only 2% of registered stem cell donors in the world are people of South Asian origin - an alarming figure considering the chances of finding a match are just 1 in 20,000.

This remarkable social deficit is accentuated by the fact that the region is home to almost a quarter of the world’s population. At the moment there are just

Will you be a donor?

The next stem cell donor recruitment drive will be held at Parish Hall, Our Lady of Holy Rosary Church, 8 Diana Avenue, Kellyville, NSW from 1 pm to 5 pm on Sunday, July 10.

Registering oneself as a potential donor is simple. Donors are asked to give 3-5 ml of blood and they are added to the Australian donor registry after their nonidentifying information is processed by the Red Cross. In this case if a donor turns out to be a match for Shehan, he/she will be contacted by the Red Cross at a later date. All costs are covered by the Australian Health System. For details contact 0434 003 962 / 0401 996 517 or log on to www.abmdr.org.au

5-6,000 South Asian stem cell donors registered in Australia. India on the other hand, has a mere 15,000 stem cell donors registered – an abysmally low number for a country with more that 1 billion people.

Shehan’s family has since focussed its attention on educating people on the need to become stem cell donors, through various campaigns across the country. To date, they have managed to add about 600 new potential donors of South Asian background to the registry in Australia. Such drives will not only help Shehan, but also the wider community.

“When Shehan’s condition was first discovered three months ago after the birth of his child, we realised that there was no stem cell donor registry in Sri Lanka,” says Shehan’s father Sherwell Fernando, who was at one such drive at Parramatta in Sydney recently.

“His has an unusual tissue type, which makes finding a perfect match even more difficult,” says Joan Harrington from Blood Service, Bone Marrow Donor Centre, NSW and ACT.

“The stem cell transplant procedure is not very different from the normal blood donation, requiring a few injections over a few days before drawing out the bloodproducing stem cells from the bloodstream,” Joan adds.

“It’s very important to educate the people on this issue. We’ve been extremely lucky and fortunate to have had such great support from this family. In the last few months we have realised that people are willing to come forward and help if they are educated about it,” Joan says.

These days in most cases, stem cell transplantation has replaced bone marrow transplantation and the cells are removed from the circulating blood instead of the bone. This procedure is not only simpler, it is considerably less inconvenient for the donor.

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