Marrow-Donor Network Offers to Assist Victims

The nuclear reactor accident in the Soviet Union has focused attention on a virtually unknown pool of about 75,000 persons in the United States, Britain and Scandinavia who are on call to donate bone marrow for medical emergencies, including ones at nuclear power plants.

Armand Hammer, chairman of the President’s Cancer Panel, contacted the Soviet Embassy in Washington on Tuesday and offered use of the donor network to assist Soviet citizens who may have received lethal doses of radiation in the accident near Kiev. Hammer is also chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp.

Hammer’s Los Angeles office confirmed the offer on Wednesday but declined to say whether the Soviets have responded. The State Department said Moscow has turned down a U.S. offer to send doctors and provide technical expertise to help with the disaster.

Hammer extended the offer on behalf of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry, an organization that keeps track of bone-marrow transplants around the world and has access to lists of an estimated 75,000 potential donors, according to the group’s president, Dr. Robert P. Gale of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In an interview, Gale said he has no idea how many Soviets may have been exposed to enough radiation to make them candidates for a marrow transplant. But he said that the procedure is the best way--in fact, the only way--to treat otherwise fatal cases of radiation sickness.

“Individuals who received lethal doses and were not killed outright will die within one to two weeks because of bone-marrow failure,” Gale said. “The way to save them is by identifying donors and doing transplants.”

Radiation destroys bone marrow, where many components of blood and the immune system are produced, and causes death from bleeding and infections.

Registry Offers

Gale said the international organization offered to send experts to the Soviet Union to help identify patients who need a transplant and to identify by tissue type potential donors in Western countries.

“This is not an unreal situation to us. We have been forming donor pools for precisely such an event as has occurred in the Soviet Union,” the physician said.

Gale said that marrow transplants would be most effective on those exposed to 500 to 700 rems of radiation. The average person is exposed to about 200 millirems a year; there are 1,000 millirems in a rem.

The registry, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the European Atomic Energy Community and a number of private sources, keeps track of marrow transplants in the 50 member nations and has access to lists of volunteer donors.

The Soviet Union, which has medical centers capable of doing marrow transplants, is not a member nation.

Marrow transplants are relatively new; about 9,000 have been done worldwide since the operation was developed about 15 years ago. Most are performed as treatments for acute myelogenous leukemia and aplastic anemia, with a success rate of 60% to 70%. In most cases, the donor is a close relative of the recipient.