Hospital Asks for Donors for Bone Marrow Transplants

In an effort to save the lives of two 17-year-old high school seniors, Brea Community Hospital is sponsoring a drive to find bone marrow donors who might be able reduce the 1-in-20,000 odds of finding a suitable match.

Both Anissa Ayala of Walnut and Brandon Oba of Brea found out last year they have chronic leukemia, a fatal cancer of the blood that is progressive and curable only by bone marrow transplants.

Ordinarily, transplants are done with relatives whose blood tissue matches that of the patient. But because no one in their families had tissue that matched, the search has gone public, said Judy Brenner of Huntington Beach, a volunteer who is spearheading the drive in conjunction with Life-Savers Foundation, a Covina-based national nonprofit organization founded to recruit potential marrow donors.

“When you first ask someone if they want to be a bone-marrow donor, it sounds horrible,” she said. “But when they hear what a small commitment it is, that it’s easy to get tested, most people are willing to give up a day or two and 5% of their bone marrow to save someone’s life.”

Brea Community Hospital, which has become involved in the teen-agers’ cases as a community service, has scheduled a day of testing Monday for its employees and three days of public testing for donors beginning Sept. 17, a spokesman said. It is the first hospital in the country to recruit donors and pay for lab tests, said Dr. Rudolf L. Brutoco, a Covina pediatrician who founded Life-Savers last year after a nationwide search produced a donor for his wife, who became leukemia-free as a result.

Tests are paid for by the hospital and Life-Savers, as well as by funds raised by Brenner and others.

Test results of potential donors will be sent to a computer bank in St. Paul, Minn., that is run by the National Institutes of Health, Brutoco said. While the drive is being publicized to help the two teen-agers, people also are being asked to donate to any of the other 9,000 patients nationwide who are awaiting marrow donors.

The success rate with matched relatives is 60% to 70%; the success rate with matched non-relatives, an operation begun only a few years ago, is unknown but likely to be comparable, said Dr. Stephen J. Foreman, director of the department of hematology and bone marrow transplantation at the City of Hope Medical Center in Duarte.

But as it stands now, “these kids have a zero prognosis,” Brenner said. “If there’s no bone marrow transplant, they will die.”

In the meantime, Anissa said, she tries to make herself as happy as possible. “A lot of people say, ‘How sad.’ But everybody can die. You can get killed in a car accident,” said the teen-ager, who plans to attend Walnut High School this year and wants to become a psychologist counseling cancer patients.

“I’m just living as happy as I can through this, you know? Once I get a donor, I’ll be fine--I’ll be great.”

Neither Brandon nor his family could be reached for comment Friday.

Further information about donor testing may be obtained by calling Brea Community Hospital at (714) 529-4589, or Life-Savers Foundation at (800) 999-8822.