I thought race was a social construct? But this story claims that race is real and your life might depend on racial compatibility.
Matthew Medina’s doctors diagnosed him with a rare blood disease a few months ago and told him he would probably die without a bone marrow transplant.
With that prognosis came another: The 40-year-old Los Angeles police officer had a less than 50% chance of finding a donor because he is not white.
Most successful matches for bone marrow transplants involve a donor and patient of the same ethnicity. But the majority of the 25 million registered donors nationwide are white, and Medina is Filipino. So far, no match has been found.
“You’re basically looking for a genetic twin,” said Athena Mari Asklipiadis, who runs Mixed Marrow, an L.A.-based organization that is trying to increase diversity in the bone marrow donor registry. “It’s not like we have more of a chance we would get a disease, or that we’re harder to match, it’s just that there’s not representation in the national registry.”
It’s a familiar problem for any nonwhite person who has needed a bone marrow transplant.
A white American of European descent has a 75% chance of finding a perfect match in the national donor registry, compared with a 40% chance for Filipinos. Few Filipinos in the U.S. have signed up as potential donors, and there is no registry in the Philippines.
I wonder why Filipinos are not signing up to donate blood marrow? I wonder why whites donate in large numbers?
