The New Zealand Bone Marrow Donor Registry is currently recruiting donors with Māori and Pacific ancestry. Photo: NZ Bone Marrow Donor Registry
The New Zealand Bone Marrow Donor Registry is currently recruiting donors with Māori and Pacific ancestry for six patients.
There are over 40 million bone marrow donors registered worldwide, however there are only 6000 Māori and 3000 Pacific Island donors. Other ethnic groups are also not as well represented.
Bone marrow transplant is a treatment option for patients living with cancer.
Ancestry usually plays a role in finding a matched bone marrow donor as tissue type is inherited, but when patients are unable to match with their relatives, finding a donor from the same ethnic background offers the next best chance.
One mother that knows all too well the struggle to find Māori and Pacific bone marrow donors is Keri Topperwien (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou).
After losing her three-year-old son Chace to acute myeloid leukemia in 2012, Topperwien and her husband established the Dream Chaser Foundation, a charity dedicated to helping children with cancer.
Topperwein told Pacific Waves there are multiple reasons why the number of Māori and Pacific donors are significantly low.
"I think people just don't know about it," she said.
"Unless it's intimately in your life, it's hard to understand ... there's also a lot of old school myths around the process of donating bone marrow, so that can be scary for some people.
"Technology has moved on quite considerably since how they used to take bone marrow from the body and it's much less scary and much less invasive."
Bone marrow can be extracted either through a procedure called leukapherises, where stem cells are collected from blood, or from the pelvic hip bone using a needle, or from the umbilical cord blood.
Topperwien also said cultural beliefs can also discourage Māori and Pacific to becoming donors.
"There's always cultural hesitation, perhaps understanding how it works and you know the sacredness of the body and taking body fluid from yourself to another."
However, she added that knowledge building from a Māori or Pacific lens can make a difference.
"We usually frame it through whakapapa because if you are matched with someone, then somewhere along the line, your genetic makeup has overlapped or crossed over, so here's that nice conection and when you start framing it like that and talking to people about the fact that only Māori can save Māori, it takes the layers of fear and uncertainty away and people start to engage with the topic a lot more comfortably."
The Dream Chaser Foundation actively promotes bone marrow awareness.
Topperwien said her late son is the driving force behind their work.
"We know first-hand the desperation of not having a bone marrow match anywhere in the world for our son," she said.
"If we can just save one life, then all the effort is worth it."
