Quest to find Rhys, 6 a bone-marrow donor
May 14 2007
by Madeleine Brindley, Western Mail
PATIENTS are dying because not enough people have registered as potential bone- marrow donors. Only about 10m people worldwide are registered as potential bone-marrow donors – 60,000 live in Wales. There is also a dire shortage of male donors, who can provide larger amounts of blood stem cells, on the register. The stark warning comes as one family faces a race against time to find a suitable match for their six-year-old son. Rhys Harris, who suffers from the rare genetic disease Nemo, desperately needs to find a good match to give him a chance of life. His family, from Newbridge, are hoping to arrange a bone marrow drive in Cardiff, in a bid to find a match. A spokeswoman for the Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust said, “At any one time, there are approximately 7,000 children and adults throughout the world needing to find a suitable bone-marrow donor. “This means that the Anthony Nolan Trust has an urgent need to recruit more donors to increase our chance of finding a suitable lifesaving match for these patients.” A bone-marrow transplant is vital for Rhys’ treatment – if a match can be found his own immune system will be killed off by chemotherapy. Rhys will undergo the treatment in Newcastle, spending nine months in an airtight room while his new immune system grows. But no exact bone-marrow matches have yet been found and time is running out – experts gave Rhys just 12 to 18 months to live, six months ago. His father Kevin said, “It is really tough, especially having to put a six-year-old through chemotherapy and a life-threatening process. “But to know that he might not even get to that stage is even worse. “The doctors have told us that they would rather be dealing with a happy, strong boy like Rhys is now, than a very, very sick child. “We are really up against it – the longer we leave it, the more chance the doctors have of having to deal with a very sick child.” Suitable bone-marrow donors are difficult to find because they must have hundreds of factors in common with the patient. Donors must match six different factors, but within each of these factors there are hundreds of variations. Only 30% of patients who need a bone-marrow transplant are a “match” with a family member, meaning the vast majority of patients rely on anonymous donors. It is thought that people do not come forward to put their name on the register because of “myths” surrounding the donation process, including how painful people imagine it can be to donate. But joining a bone-marrow register only involves giving a teaspoon-sized amount of blood to be tissue typed. Trudi Evans, recruitment publicity manager for the Welsh Blood Service, which recruits existing blood donors to its bone-marrow register, said, “On our own register we find at least another four new tissue types that we have never seen before every week. “With only 60,000 people in Wales on the registers, it is very important that people come forward to join. “I have one daughter who is a nurse. When we searched the registers for potential matches for her, there was just one person who could help her. “That made the hairs on my neck stand up – I couldn’t imagine life without her. While we can find some matches, a lot of people do not have that opportunity and we are losing them purely because of that.” The Anthony Nolan Bone Marrow Trust can be contacted on 020 7284 1234 and the Welsh Blood Service on 0800 252 266.

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