A shot in the Arm
Students Organize Lifesaving Bone Marrow Drives
It started in 1998 when a Medical College of Georgia nursing student organized a bone marrow drive to help a classmate with leukemia. Fifty people stepped forward.
Today, MCG students have led nearly 1,000 individuals to the National Marrow Donor Program’s Bone Marrow Donor Registry. Each new name on the list is an opportunity for a bone marrow match – something that 3,000 people across the nation with leukemia and other cancers desperately await. Annually, more than 30,000 children and adults are diagnosed with a life-threatening blood disease treatable by a bone marrow transplant.
“The match process is a sustaining hope, and for some patients, this is all they have left,” said Patrick Holmes, a first-year student in the MCG School of Medicine who helped organize the fourth annual MCG Bone Marrow Drive in April.
In addition to planning and advertising the drive, students raise funds to cover the cost of human leukocyte antigen testing needed to match a donor and a patient. HLA testing can cost upward of $800, but the students partner with the National Marrow Donor Program to hold the cost at $25.
“Federal funding is available to help us diversify the registry,” explained Susan Cook, recruitment specialist in the National Marrow Donor Program’s Greater Southeast Area Office. “Typically it costs us $65 to test Caucasian people; however, we were able to secure funding for the MCG drive so students were responsible for [paying] only $25 per person tested.”
Tests for minorities are free because minorities are sorely needed on the registry.
“We have 5.6 million potential donors and less than 20 percent are minorities,” she said. “Because this is genetic testing, people of the same ethnic background are more likely to find a match. Chances of matching range from one in 100,000 to one in a million, so it’s really important to have a diverse list of people on the registry.”
The 2005 bone marrow drive was Ms. Cook’s second year working with MCG students. “It’s tremendous to have a committee of people who are medical students – who know what it is we are doing, the importance of what we are doing and who will be our liaisons in the medical community in the future,” she said. “These students do an excellent job. We had a great deal of community participation this year which showed they really reached out to spread the word.”
Amid the rigors of school, family and, for some students, work commitments, medical students keep finding time to conduct the drive mainly because “it is a refreshing reminder of your original ambition to serve others in a fundamental way,” said Beth Hoddeson, Patrick’s classmate and co-leader of the 2005 drive. “Helping out with this drive was so satisfying and fulfilling. I felt really connected to the community here, and it made me so happy to see how interested our neighbors were in helping each other in such a very important way.”
Their faculty advisor for the program, Dr. Kathleen McKie, a pediatrician in the Section of Hematology and Oncology, is continually impressed with the event’s growing success. The 2005 drive enrolled 381 potential donors – 146 more than last year’s drive, and 106 were minorities, the highest number of any drive since the program’s inception. Students also raised $6,785 to cover testing costs.
“There is a tremendous amount of work organizing, coordinating, advertising and logistically arranging such an effort,” said Dr. McKie. “On top of all that, raising the money for the potential donors to be enrolled at no personal expense is a huge undertaking. It has been an honor to work with these students and see their diligence. Most of all, I love this for the humanism it fosters in our students though the donors and the families they touch.”
Seeking new ways to
broaden their reach, MCG students have partnered with Augusta State University
for the past two years. In 2004, ASU communications students produced and mailed
a brochure about the drive to 150 Augusta-area churches. They also produced a
30-second public service announcement to encourage minority participation. This
year, ASU students found corporate sponsors to pay for T-shirts to publicize the
drive, helped organize a fundraiser at a local coffeehouse and helped staff the
drive.
Another partnership also developed during the 2005 drive: tapping into the talents of MCG medical illustration students. Dr. McKie worked with Steve Harrison, chair of the Department of Medical Illustration in the School of Allied Health Sciences, to help publicize the drive with art.
“Medical illustration students have such a unique talent to make difficult physiologic functions more understandable,” said Dr. McKie. “I wanted to see if there was a way to showcase the talent of MCG’s medical illustration program while promoting the drive.”
Mr. Harrison’s seven first-year students produced informational graphics that explain bone marrow’s function in the body, the effect of a bone marrow transplant, how an a HLA match works and how leukemia impacts the ability to produce healthy blood cells. Medical students used the art as posters and flyers in area churches, businesses and schools to promote the drive.
“Medical illustrators are often called upon to produce instructional artwork like this,” said Michael Konomos, president of his medical illustration class. “All of us really enjoy what we do, but it is particularly gratifying when our illustrations can play a small part in saving someone’s life.”
For more information about donation, visit the National Marrow Donor Program’s Web site at www.marrow.org.
--Ellen Gladden