Each year in Australia around 900 people are diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, of which around fifty are children ().
While donors with north-west European backgrounds are over-represented, a multi-racial patient has much less chance of finding a matching donor. This was the case with Sean. Sean’s mother Dian is South African with Western European descent and his father is Armenian. The odds were stacked against Sean because of his diverse genetic makeup.
‘Sean was an only child and there wasn’t an option of looking at his brothers and sisters for a possible match’, says Dian. Initially, ‘the transplant coordinators at Westmead Children’s Hospital started to look at the donor registries for bone marrow donors within Sydney and later within Australia and couldn’t find any donors’ recalls Dian. After exhausting their search in Australia, the transplant coordinators at Westmead Children’s Hospital ‘started looking internationally and at the time there were 10 million donors worldwide and couldn’t find a match’.
Then they started looking for an umbilical cord match. They found a match in France but there were differences in tissue type. ‘It was the best they could find, says Dian, they said this will give your son the best chance of survival.’ However, ‘the donor cells started to attack his body. The process is called graft vs host disease. It attacked Sean’s body mercilessly, remembers Dian, and ‘over time he got sicker and sicker and then he died’.
Mixed marriages are becoming more predominant in our multicultural society. The same trend is also very visible in the Australian-Armenian community and the number of Australians of mixed racial Armenian heritage are increasing.
A good preventative measure is to increase the number of bone marrow donors with the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry (). Not only Armenian donors are needed but also mixed-race Armenians.
Dian says while they were looking for a matching bone marrow donor, she realized there were insufficient Armenian bone marrow donors in Australia. “If you look within your own ethnic group’ she says, ‘there’s greater chance of finding a matching donor that’s why I felt it was important to increase the numbers of Armenian donors within the donor registry’.
Dian feels something good could come out of her son’s loss. In Sean’s memory, she’s launching a campaign that aims to boost the Armenian presence on bone marrow registries so that other families find a compatible organ donor more easily. As part of the campaign, she will be organizing blood drives for the public across Sydney.
