China Marrow Donor Program records 19,000th donation

The China Marrow Donor Program, a nonprofit organization that runs the national data bank on donors and volunteers, said on Friday that it has recorded its 19,000th bone marrow donation.

China saw its first hematopoietic stem cell donation from an unrelated volunteer in 1996. The total number of donations has climbed since then, reaching 17,000 in late February and 18,000 in mid-July, according to the organization.

This year, more than 2,200 donations have been recorded so far, with last month alone recording 211 donations.

Nearly 3.5 million volunteers have registered with the organization to become potential donors, making it the world's fourth largest donor registry and the largest in Asia.

The 19,000th donor is a grassroots worker from Gansu province in Northwest China.

She registered as a donor in 2018 while attending college. This October, she was informed that her bone marrow type matched with that of a blood disease patient, to which she agreed to make donations to without hesitation.

Earlier this month she traveled to Lanzhou, provincial capital of Gansu, to make preparations and had her bone marrow collected on Friday.

"I am the 19,000th donor, but the number of blood disease patients waiting for a match is much larger," she said. "I hope that my action could motivate more people to join the registry and rid more patients of their pain."