Bonfils Blood Center is teaming up with the Food Bank of the Rockies and Community Food Share to help save lives multiple ways at once.
Bonfils is waiving the fee to register with the National Marrow Donor Program for bone marrow donation (normally $30) if you bring in a can of food when you come in to donate. The food banks will be helping families in need through the holidays with the canned food, and I'm sure all two of my regular readers have been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to donate bone marrow. A list of Bonfils donation locations are here. Most, if not all, of the donation centers have evening and/or weekend hours, and the staff has always been fantastically super-nice and very competent - I've only had one painful needle stick in three gallons of donation with Bonfils.
Bone marrow transplant is an essential part of treatment for lymphoma, leukemia, and other blood and bone marrow cancers. Only about 30 percent of patients needing a marrow transplant can find a suitable donor within their family; the other 70 percent are left to the whims of who has registered with the NMDP. Since a match will most likely be found in someone with the same genetic background as the patient, it can be especially hard for minorities to find a suitable donor. This is why it's especially crucial for as many people as possible to register.
1 comment:
If your readers are still interested in joining a bone marrow or cord blood registry, they might want to check up on Gift of Life. Gift of Life is working on letting people know how easy it is to become a potential marrow donor -- it just takes a cheek swab -- and helping people spread the word through blogs and social media.
If you're interested, I'd recommend visiting their site to learn more; they're also making it easy to post about it on blogs, forums, Facebook, Twitter, and the like.
Post a Comment