Cheek Swabs to Find Bone Marrow donors
If you make it easy then maybe people will be more likely to step up and help. Looks like that strategy worked here. Cheek swabs to find donors is a much less invasive method of finding a bone marrow match than a blood draw.
A B.C. pilot project using free, Web mail-order cheek swab kits to recruit young and ethnically diverse bone marrow stem cell donors, is being deemed such a whopping success that it's now being rolled out across the country.
Ethnic groups are being targeted because 85 per cent of would-be donors in the bone marrow registry are Caucasian, which makes it highly difficult to find matches for ethnic patients. Younger donors are sought because they are the healthiest.
The national program follows a Canadian Blood Services (CBS) project over the past four months in B.C., during which cheek swab kits were mailed to those between the ages of 17 and 50 after they registered for them online.
The kits contain long sticks resembling Q-tips to scrape skin cells from the inside of cheeks. The kit is sent back to CBS in Ottawa; the individual's DNA is then extracted, typed and entered in a database.
Before the cheek swab kits were introduced, would-be donors had to go to a laboratory for a blood draw, a far more expensive, inconvenient process. Now the cheek swab kits will largely replace laboratory blood collection for DNA typing.
Source: Canada.com
