Group’s Plea to Asians: Donate Bone Marrow

When 14-year-old Kim Chi Nguyen was diagnosed with sideroblastic anemia four years ago and doctors told her she needed a bone marrow transplant, her grandfather didn’t worry so much about not finding the perfect match. He didn’t think he’d find a donor at all.

“No one is going to be willing to help,” 65-year-old Nhan Nguyen recalled thinking Tuesday. “Vietnamese have so much fears when we hear ‘bone marrow transplant.’ We don’t want to deal with or learn about the unknown. I didn’t think my granddaughter would have a chance.”

Today, a perfect bone marrow match has yet to be found for the Westminster High School freshman. But the odds are measurably better now than they were four years ago because of the efforts of the Asian Pacific community in Southern California, which has launched marrow drives to help patients like Kim Chi.

Since 1991, Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches has recruited more than 34,000 Asian donors in the Southland to the National Marrow Donor Program registry.

To help Kim Chi and a 1-year-old Vietnamese toddler in Germany, the Los Angeles-based group is spearheading nine simultaneous drives in Los Angeles and Orange counties Saturday in the hopes of recruiting 1,001 donors.

“Historically, [Asian Americans] haven’t been so involved with blood donations and organ donations,” Sharon Sugiyama, the organization’s project director, said Tuesday at a news conference to announce the drives to recruit donors. “The need is great. If we can get the [donor] pool to increase, we can find matches and save lives.”

According to the National Marrow Donor Program, of the 5,424 people who registered to be donors in 1987, only 1.7% were Asian Americans. Today, the total number of registered donors nationwide has increased to 2,648,883, and the percentage of Asian American potential donors has risen to 5.4%.

Sugiyama and others involved in the donor recruitment effort say minority groups have the least chance of finding matching donors because they have fewer donors in the registry.

Additionally, many Asian Americans have deep-rooted cultural beliefs that discourage them from donating blood or any part of their bodies. Traditional Vietnamese Buddhists, for example, have long held that if they lose a part of their body, they would be incomplete and therefore may have trouble reincarnating in the next life.

But mostly, Sugiyama and others said, what keeps Asian Americans from becoming possible bone marrow donors is the lack of information and understanding about a process that is relatively simple.

Thanh Nguyen, a Westminster resident who donated bone marrow in 1994, said Tuesday some of the side effects included stiffness and sleeplessness. But he was able to drive the day after the procedure and within two weeks after the process, he resumed his normal physical activities.

Meanwhile, Kim Chi Nguyen, whose relatives could not provide a match for her potentially fatal iron-deficiency blood disease, awaits a marrow donor. On Tuesday, the girl with a shy smile burst into tears as she listened to statistics about the dearth of possible Asian American donors.

“It just hits me,” said Kim Chi, who gets a blood transfusion once a month as temporary treatment. “All the times I’ve been in and out of a hospital and all the times I’ve been sick. Today, it just hits me.”

She remains hopeful that a perfect bone marrow match is out there somewhere. Maybe, she said, that match could be found as early as Saturday.

She added: “That would be great, and I would be very happy.”