Swab campaign to mark Sue Harris anniversary
ON THE 25th anniversary of the death of Sue Harris after a well-publicised battle against leukaemia, the trust established in her memory is holding a “Jewish Swab Week”.
Ms Harris had received a blood cancer diagnosis shortly after her 30th birthday.
With no siblings, she needed an unrelated matching bone marrow donor.
A Jewish patient is more likely to find a match from a fellow
Jew. But at the time, there were just 48 Jewish donors on the national register and a campaign was launched to recruit more.
Sue Harris Trust secretary Lionel Salama said the campaign recruited over 15,000 Jewish donors to the national register.
However, a first potential donor for Ms Harris pulled out a few days before the transplant; the second came too late to save her life.
Mr Salama said the trust began “by helping other Jewish patients, counselling them on their options and recruiting more donors.
“We quickly realised that the real potential lay in Israel. So we helped to establish what is now one of the world’s most populated registers. Today, a Jewish patient anywhere in the world with blood cancer and needing a stem cell donor has a far better chance of finding a match than any other ethnic minority patient.”
The trust has also been instrumental in advancing the use of umbilical cord blood, rich in stem cells, which would otherwise be thrown away.
Appropriately for the silver anniversary week, the trust is holding 25 donor recruitment events in Jewish secondary schools, campus Jewish societies and two Gateshead seminaries.