Page 30 - HKMMFTOFLIP

香港骨髓捐贈基金的成立及發展
Establishment & Development of Hong Kong Marrow Match Foundation (HKMMF)
Establishment & Development of
Hong Kong Marrow Match Foundation (HKMMF)
Every year, over 1,200 adults and children in Hong Kong are diagnosed with leukaemia and other serious blood diseases. For many of them, bone marrow transplantation may be the only hope for a cure, if a matched donor is available. Some patients are fortunate enough to have a suitable donor within their families. Others will need to find unrelated but matched donors to help. However, it is by no means easy.
In 1991, sixteen-month-old Gordon Wu, a Chinese Canadian, was urgently in need of bone marrow transplantation to treat a serious blood disease. Since no suitable donor could be identified within his family or among unrelated donors worldwide, his parents brought him back to Hong Kong to launch the “Save Little Gordon” Campaign, subsequent to which, the Hong Kong Marrow Match Foundation (HKMMF) was established. The campaign had attracted tremendous responses and around 15,000 people registered for bone marrow donation within a few weeks. It had led to the setting up of the world’s first all-Chinese bone marrow donor registry, the HKMMF Registry, to help Chinese patients to find suitable bone marrow donors, for saving their lives.
In April 1992, the first unrelated bone marrow
transplant in Hong Kong using a donation from the HKMMF Registry successfully took place. Five months later, the first bone marrow for an overseas patient from a HKMMF donor was sent to Australia. In November 1994, the first unrelated marrow transplant using an overseas (US) donation was performed in Hong Kong. Since inception, the HKMMF successfully processed a total of 1,204 bone marrow (including cord blood) donations, among which 784 were from local Hong Kong donors and cord blood to 658 Hong Kong and 126 overseas patients respectively; and 420 from overseas donors to Hong Kong patients.
A total of 23 countries had received bone marrow donations from Hong Kong and/or supplied bone marrow (cord blood) to Hong Kong.
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