Today David Smyth is turning 20 and hoping for the best birthday present, a bone marrow donor. He has leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. At six months old, David was diagnosed with Shwachman-Diamond syndrome, which causes bone marrow to dysfunction which has lead to leukemia. The leukemia is on David’s spine and causing him to lose feeling from the waist down.

Please help in finding David a match by joining the One Match Stem Cell Registry (www.blood.ca) and spreading awareness to your family and friend.

To read the full article in The Peterborough Examiner, click here

As summer is in full swing Windsor’s Canadian Blood Services has a potential shortage of blood donations. They are already short 10,000 appointments of filling the 137,000 units of blood needed between now and September 11th. Please call 1-888-236-6283 to donate. Click here to read the full article in the Windsor Star.

Save a Latin Life, a community group based in Toronto will be hosting a swab event at Toronto's annual Hispanic Fiesta the weekend of September 4-5. Tissue type is inherited and ethnicity plays an important role in matching stem cell donors. There is a pressing need for hispanic donors and Save a Latin Life is working hard to spread the word within the community.

Hispanic Fiesta
Mel Lastman Square
5100 Yonge Street, Toronto, ON
Saturday, September 4, 2010 and Sunday, September 5, 2010

Click HERE to download a flyer for this event and information in Spanish about bone marrow and stem cell donation.

Mandi Schwartz has proven herself to be a fighter on and off the ice.

And now she's in what a friend calls "literally in the fight of her life."

With the help of family and friends, the 22-year-old Schwartz is taking on cancer.

In December 2008, Schwartz was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. After five grueling rounds of chemotherapy and a lengthy 130-day hospital stay in Regina, she was declared cancer-free. In January of this year, Schwartz's teammates on the Yale University Bulldogs women's hockey team warmly welcomed her back to school and the rink as she resumed her studies in medicine.

But on April 22, as Yale was hosting its second bone marrow drive, Schwartz was on a plane home to Regina.

She had learned from a routine blood exam a couple of days prior that she had relapsed and the cancer had returned. Currently, Schwartz is in hospital in Regina and has just finished her first round of chemotherapy, said Dr. Ted Collins, immunologist and her doctor at Yale University.

Click here to read more on Mandi in the Leader-Post.

A Manitoba aboriginal woman battling leukemia has died while waiting on an extremely slim chance of finding a bone-marrow donor to save her life.

Chantelle Chornoby, 21, died over the weekend. She first beat cancer when she was 10, but fought leukemia since 2007.

Canadian Blood Services estimates that only 0.9% of the 249,000 potential donors registered in their database are aboriginal.

Click here to read more in the Winnipeg Free Press.

WASHINGTON - Bone marrow transplants are undergoing a quiet revolution: No longer just for cancer, research is under way to ease the risks so they can target more people with diseases from sickle cell to deadly metabolic disorders.

The old way: High doses of radiation and chemotherapy wipe out a patient's own bone marrow before someone else's is infused to replace it, hopefully before infection strikes.

The new way: Rather than destroying the patient's bone marrow, just tamp it down enough to make space for the donated marrow to squeeze in alongside and a sort of twin immune system takes root. It's what doctors taking a page from mythology call "mixed-cell chimerism" — patient and donor blood and immune cells living together to improve health. Click here to read the full article on msn.com

A little girl from the UK is in an extremely vulnerable state as she is waiting for her bone marrow transplant. The donation is coming from Canada . This girl is one of 16 patients waiting for this life-saving procedure. The longer the flight disruption continues, the likely this number will rise. Click here to read more from The Sun.

A stem cell drive held last Saturday in Toronto and Vancouver attracted thousands. The goal was to register between 1,500 and 2,000. This historic drive had 4,025 people sign up as donors with One Match Stem Cell and Marrow Network. To read more on the success of this event see below.

• Metro News
• Vancouver Sun

How did you hear about the need for bone marrow or stem transplants? How did you learn about the Bone Marrow Registry? Sadly, most find out when a loved one is in need of a transplant. It is organizations like the Canadian Blood Services, Katelyn Bedard Bone Marrow Association, Better World Today Association and Other Half that are working hard to educate and grow our registry.

The best chance of finding a stem-cell donor is within a patient’s own ethnic group. Chinese Canadians only have a five to ten percent chance of finding a donor. This number decreases with children of mixed ethnic backgrounds.

Pass on this information, this website. Post it on your Facebook page or Twitter. The more people on the registry, the greater the diversity, the better chances we have to save someone’s life.

To read about the current promotion of awareness in the Chinese Community read this article posted in the Vancouver sun.