Viet Youth Flying to U.S. to Save His Brother’s Life : Hanoi Aids Marrow Transplant

A teen-ager from a Mekong Delta hamlet is scheduled to fly from here to Chicago today to participate in an emergency bone marrow transplant that doctors hope will save the life of his desperately ill refugee brother.

Vo Tien Duc, 33, who fled Vietnam by boat seven years ago, is in the intensive care unit of the University of Illinois Medical Center suffering from aplastic anemia, a disease in which the bone marrow stops making essential white blood cells.

Doctors have given him as little as two weeks to live without the transplanted marrow, which must come from a sibling with a compatible blood type.

In a rare show of cooperation between the two former enemies, the governments in Hanoi and Washington helped doctors in a rush effort to pinpoint the 18-year-old youth, Vo Hoang Van, whose blood type was found to be compatible, and then expedite his departure for Chicago, where he is expected to arrive late Friday.

Contacts between the two countries have been minimal since communist North Vietnam toppled the American-backed South Vietnamese government 10 years ago next Tuesday.

One of 10 Children

The odyssey that will bring Van--one of 10 children of a fish trader in a small Kien Giang province town 150 miles south of Ho Chi Minh City--to his brother’s bedside began only three weeks ago.

On April 4, Duc’s physician, Dr. Melody Cobleigh, contacted a representative of the U.S. Committee for Scientific Cooperation With Vietnam, seeking assistance in locating a donor for her patient.

Dr. Judith Ladinsky, the group’s chairman and a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, quickly secured State Department assurance that a Vietnamese donor would be granted entry to the United States. She then contacted officials in Hanoi and at Vietnam’s U.N. mission in New York, seeking permission to enter Vietnam and asking for assistance in locating Duc’s family.

She received her visa one week later and arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, on April 18 aboard the weekly Air France flight.

Authorities whisked her to Cho Ray Hospital in Cholon, the old Chinese quarter of what used to be Saigon, where four of Duc’s brothers and sisters as well as his father were waiting.

Unaware of Plight

The family knew nothing of Duc’s plight until government officials came to fetch them four days earlier.

At the hospital, Ladinsky drew blood samples from the five, the first blood tests any of them had ever taken. She then rushed back to the airport where Air France personnel had delayed the plane’s return trip to Bangkok to wait for the blood samples.

They were carried on board by a U.S. State Department consular officer who handed them to an Australian doctor who had the blood tested. Of the four siblings tested, the results showed that only Van’s blood type was identical with Duc’s.

Ladinsky said that with the operation, which is scheduled for next week, Duc has a 60% to 80% chance of survival. She said doctors would keep Van in Chicago for at least two months to make sure the transplant was successful and the procedure did not have to be repeated. At the end of that time, plans call for the teen-ager to return to Vietnam.

Bob Secter reported from Ho Chi Minh City and Larry Green from Chicago.