People of two or more races are uniquely disadvantaged when it comes to bone marrow matching. Blood diseases such as leukemia or Hodgkin lymphoma can be treated by replacing damaged bone marrow with a healthy transplant, ideally taken from a parent or biological sibling. But for many people, immediate family isnโt an option. Registries can potentially provide a match, but it has to be near exact.
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Ethnic minorities as a wholeย comprise just 30%ย of the entries in Be The Match, a nonprofit operated by National Marrow Donor Program, which, with 16 million individuals registered, is the worldโsย largest and most diverseย marrow registry. Whatโs more, a tiny 3% of its donors self-identify as mixed-race, making us the demographic with some of the lowest odds of finding a match.
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โBone marrow donation is like so many aspects of medicine, where the focus has been on white patients (and donors) for so long that nonwhite people are still trying to catch up in terms of representation,โ said Asha Sundararaman who is South Indian and Caucasian, and enrolled to become a donor in 2007 after seeing a call for mixed-race bone marrow. โOur lack of matches is just one part of a larger, systemic, problem.โ
