A little of your bone marrow can save four children

This festive season, South Africans can help to save the lives of four sick children who urgently need bone marrow transplants and also stand a chance to win prizes worth R100 000 by donating funds for the cause.

The SA Bone Marrow Registry has helped save the lives of nearly 500 patients with life-threatening blood disorders by matching them with healthy, unrelated bone marrow donors from across the world.

For such patients, a stem cell transplant is their only chance of a healthy, normal life, but many struggle to cover the donor-related costs of the procedure, which replaces cancer cells and makes new blood cells.

The South African Bone Marrow Registry, which hopes to raise R300 000 this month to enable four local children to receive transplants has, through its patient assistance programme, created a crowdfunding campaign on BackaBuddy.

Dr Charlotte Ingram, the registry’s medical director, said funds raised through the campaign would benefit a 10-year-old girl with leukaemia, an eight-year-old boy, and a brother and sister with a hereditary form of anaemia.

The children were referred to the SA Bone Marrow Registry by doctors at state hospitals in the Eastern and Western Cape, and Limpopo.

Ingram appealed to the public to give all four of the children the chance to undergo the life-saving procedure.

• To make a donation on BackaBuddy, visit www.backabuddy. co.za/give-a-little-save-a-life

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.