Minorities Less Likely Than Whites to Find Bone Marrow Donor Through Federal Matching Program

White leukemia patients are twice as likely to receive a bone marrow transplant than black patients, even 10 years after the launch of the $420 million National Bone Marrow Donor Program, which began partly to address a "critical lack of minority bone marrow donors," the Boston Globe reports. According to an analysis by the Globe, white patients in an early-state search for healthy bone marrow have a 22% chance of finding a donor and undergoing a transplant, compared to a 17% chance for Latinos, a 15% chance for Asians and a 10% chance for blacks. In total, 11.3% of the 19,930 minority patients who initiated preliminary searches through the federal program have received transplants. A number of obstacles to increasing the number of minority donors exist, including a suspicion of Western medicine and government-sponsored tests and fears about personal information ending up in the hands of immigration officials among such populations, the Globe reports. Cost is another obstacle; many minority donors are unaware that federal funding exists to pay for blood tests, which can cost as much as $300. Further compounding the problem, some tissue groupings among minorities are "rarely found in donors from other races." Dr. Dennis Confer, chief medical officer for the National Marrow Donor Program, "Is it realistic to think that there will ever be more black people in the registry than white people? I think that's a big stretch, even with the best recruiting imaginable. I think that one of the real solutions to the missing donor problem is to learn how to do the transplants successfully without nearly perfect matches" (Arden-Smith, Boston Globe, 7/30).