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I will confess right off the bat that when I first saw this post on Sepia Mutiny, I told myself I'd come back to it later and delve deeper. I would've moved on, had it not been for my sister-in-law's insistence that I attend to
this call for help immediately.
In November last year, Vinay Chakravarthy, a 28-year-old orthopedics resident at the Boston Medical Center, was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a life-threatening cancer of the blood. A month ago his leukemia relapsed and he was informed that he needed a bone marrow transplant. Vinay's friends swung into action. They approached the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and together they have been organizing donor registration drives across the country. Their target population: South Asians.
The NMDP tells me that a cross-racial match is not impossible, but far less probable. The closer the ethnicity, the higher the chances of a perfect match.
This is where Vinay and his friends hit their first roadblock. Of the over six million registered donors, 415,000 are Asians. That's less than 7 percent. Vinay's website says South Asians form barely one percent of those registered. A press release issued by those conducting the drive for Vinay also states that while a Caucasian has a 1 in 15 chance of finding a match, a South Asian has 1 in 20,000 chance of finding one. (I am waiting for the NMDP to confirm these figures)
Now, that's a significant shortage, given that the Census Bureau estimates the country's Asian Indian population to be 2.5 million. The estimates also say that 49 percent of “single-race Asians 25 and older [...] have a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education. This compares to 27 percent for all people 25 and older.”
So what exactly is all that education doing for us?
For Vinay, the lack of registered South Asian donors was only the first hurdle. Vinay's messages about how he's doing are regularly posted on the website. Here's what happened on June 21:
Today I found out that I almost had a match. But the South Asian donor(s) is “not available”. I’m utterly devastated. I’d known that Asians as a whole came through with a whopping 60% failure rate (lower than any other ethnic group) to actually agree to the donation process once they were identified as a match, but I thought my match would be that special 40% who would do anything to save a fellow brother’s life.
Among many of the reasons South Asians generally give for declining, some say “their family would not support their donation process”. I have a question for all my Indian brothers and sisters out there: Since when did our families start to come in the way of us helping another fellow human being?? We pride ourselves on having good family values. I ask you now to remember those values that we hold so dear because that is what makes our community so special.”
What's stopping so many South Asian registered donors from following through? In an article about Vinay, ABC News quotes Dr. Galen Switzer of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center as saying:
We find with Asian-Americans [...]that the decision to donate is not made by the individual. Instead, it's a decision the family will make together. Many donors express concern that their families will not support the idea of donating.
Now Vinay's friends and supporters have made this drive not only about finding a perfect match for him or even increasing the number of South Asian registrants. They want this drive to be about finding committed donors.
Unfortunately, Vinay is not the only South Asian in dire need of a matching donor. Thirty-one-year-old Sameer Bhatia, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur from San Francisco, was diagnosed with AML in May, and needs a bone marrow transplant. His friends and family joined “Team Vinay” and together are trying to recruit committed donors ASAP.
The clock is ticking. Vinay may need a transplant as early as July 20. For that, his search for the perfect match will have to end by July 9. Sameer probably has less than two months for his transplant.
Team Vinay has completed 172 drives (over 10,000 have registered since the drives began), and promises to keep up the effort all through summer. Their website, www.helpvinay.org, is packed with information about marrow donation, how to register, stories of successful
