September 2019, Baxter Planning held a Bone Marrow Drive in honor of Jeff Bordinhao’s sister, Janie, who passed away from Leukemia in January 2019. As a result, we had 16 people register to be a bone marrow donor! This September, in honor of Blood Cancer Awareness month and Janie’s birthday, we encourage you to sign up to be in the bone marrow registry. Approximately every three minutes, a child or adult in the United States is diagnosed with a type of blood cancer. That’s 480 people a day, 175,200 people a year.
Remember, Baxter matches up to $1000 a year, per employee, in donations. Please send your donation receipts to giving@baxterplanning.com
ABOUT GIFT OF LIFE MARROW REGISTRY
Every year, thousands of people are diagnosed with life-threatening illnesses, and their best – or only – hope for a cure is a transplant from an unrelated bone marrow or blood stem cell donor. Since tissue type is inherited, a patient's best chance of finding a suitably matched donor lies with those of similar ethnic ancestry. Unfortunately, the worldwide donor pool is not representative of all ethnic and racial groups.
WHY DIVERSITY MATTERS
For a transplant to work, the donor's and recipient's tissue types must match. These are inherited, like hair and eye color, so genetic heritage is often a good predictor of matches. Yet many demographic groups have low representation in the registries, leaving some patients with little possibility of a lifesaving transplant. Increasing the registry's diversity is an urgent need to save more lives.
BLOOD CANCER HITS DIVERSE COMMUNITIES HARDER
75% of African American/Black and Multiracial blood cancer patients will never find a lifesaving donor.1
55% of Hispanic/Latino blood cancer patients will not survive due to the lack of a lifesaving donor in the registry. These communities have the highest rates of developing acute lymphocytic leukemia.2
The difficulty of finding matching marrow donors is due to the low number of diverse ethnic groups in the worldwide registry.3