Elpida Volunteer Bone Marrow Donor Bank reaches 1,100 volunteers in a month

The «Elpida» Association of Friends of Children with Cancer announced on Wednesday that its Volunteer Bone Marrow Donor Bank reached 1,100 volunteers within one month of operation.

Elpida’s target is to reach 100,000 donors during the next three years in order to make it easier for Greek

and foreign patients to find the necessary transplants. Nowadays Greece is on the lowest rung of internationally in terms of bone marrow donors, with less than 30,000 registered donors, while there are more than 23,000,000 volunteers globally.

«It is an excellent initiative which comes to fill a gap that does no honour to our country,» said Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis during an event held at the ministry to support Elpida’s efforts and he stressed that «if we explain how important this effort is and how easy it is for each and every one of us, we will manage to have thousands of registrations in the Volunteers Bank and save many human lives in the next years.»

The minister alongside many of the ministry’s employees registered as bone marrow volunteer donors to support Elpida’s efforts for more volunteers in the bone marrow bank.

Elpida collaborates with the «Marianna V. Vardinoyannis-Elpida» Children’s Oncology Unit, the only children’s oncology clinic in Greece, which performs around 200 hematopoietic stem cell transplantations on an annual basis. According to president and CEO at the Aghia Sofia Children’s Hospital Manolis Papasavvas, only 30 pct of the patients find matching transplants in their families; the rest turn to the world bank, a procedure that is time-consuming and costly. A transplant found in Europe costs 15,000 euros, he noted, while one from the United States costs 30,000 euros.

«With the introduction of the new association and the donor bank we hope that in the immediate future we will be able to reduce by far the percentage of donors searching in donor banks abroad,» Papasavas said.

source: ΑΜΝΑ

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