830 Turn Out for Bone Marrow Drive

A drive to find a bone marrow donor for an 11-year-old Burbank boy with leukemia brought out 830 people this weekend to be tested.

That’s twice as many that had initially signed up. The response prompted organizers of the drive to schedule more testing opportunities next month.

The odds of finding someone who is a preliminary match are 100,000 to one, said Robin Parks, a donor coordinator for the American Red Cross Marrow Donor Program. It will be several weeks before it is known if there are any preliminary matches in this first test group.

The testing is expensive--about $45 per blood test--but the Red Cross is covering half the cost and, additionally, more than $21,000 has been raised.

“I’m not going to worry about the money,” Peg Setti, an organizer of the drive to save Greg Smith, said Monday. “We’re just going to keep taking people.”

The next testing to find a donor for Smith will be Oct. 30 at the American Red Cross office on Valencia Boulevard in Santa Clarita. In Burbank, there will be another drive Nov. 13, from 8:30 to 11 a.m., said Setti, who works in the religious education office of St. Francis Xavier Church.

Smith is a parishioner at the church and is a fifth-grader at the parish’s school.

He was diagnosed with leukemia two years ago but had been in remission until a relapse in January. Doctors then told his family that he would need a bone marrow transplant to survive.

According to the Red Cross, the chances of finding a matching donor increases among people of the same racial group. Smith is of Spanish, Scottish and German heritage.

A match for Smith has not been found among his family members or the nearly 1 million people in a national registry.

Parks said cases such as Smith’s help boost the numbers of donor candidates who join the National Marrow Donor Registry. “You will get a lot of people to come out if there are kids involved,” Parks said.