Girl’s Legacy Could Include Other Lives Saved

Michelle Carew left behind a huge legacy via her family’s unprecedented appeal to encourage minority bone marrow donors, National Marrow Donor Program officials said Wednesday.

National registry officials do not have a specific tally, but they say potentially thousands of ethnic minorities have stepped forward to become donors since Rod and Marilynn Carew went public with their daughter’s leukemia diagnosis in November.

“That was absolutely awesome,” said Dr. Craig Howe, chief executive officer of the Minneapolis-based donor program, of the family’s plea. “It’s the major initiative we have at the present time--to increase the racial diversity of the registry.”

The registry held a news conference following Michelle’s death Wednesday to publicly thank the Carews for their contributions.

Minorities are woefully underrepresented in the national registry, officials said. For instance, fewer than 5% of the registry’s 1.8 million donors are black. Other than immediate family, a patient’s most likely match is someone of the same race.

Michelle’s mixed race heritage made it especially difficult to find a match (her father is West Indian and Panamanian, and her mother is of Russian-Jewish heritage).

“Hopefully, out of the tragedy of Michelle’s dying, people will realize the importance of going out and getting [their marrow] typed,” said Dr. Richard Stiehm, chief of pediatric immunology at UCLA Children’s Hospital.

“She has heightened the awareness. Maybe that awareness will save another teenager or another child,” said Barbara Wilks, a spokesman for the American Red Cross blood services. In Los Angeles, the plight of Michelle, along with two Oxnard children with a rare immune system disorder, prompted 7,600 people to get their blood tested in December and January.

When her search for a suitable marrow donor failed, Michelle underwent a rare transfusion procedure using umbilical cord blood in March at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, which received thousands of calls offering help and support. The cord transplant procedure has been performed about 200 times in the world.

The infusion is similar to a bone marrow transplant because blood from the umbilical cord contains the same type of stem cells that are found in bone marrow. Stem cells have the ability to reproduce into healthy blood cells.

At the time of Michelle’s transfusion, her doctor, Mitchell S. Cairo, said the treatment had a 75% to 90% chance of success. But Michelle’s cancer was advanced, and she suffered other life-threatening complications, doctors said.

Michelle’s cord blood donation came from the New York Blood Center. Officials at the center said they will make a routine review of Cairo’s report on Michelle’s transfusion.

“That will enable us to . . . understand as well as we can what happened or what went wrong and see whether there were lessons that can help future cases,” said Dr. Pablo Rubinstein, director of the center’s placental blood program.