For more information about the Feb. 23 donor drive, contact Lanier May at lanier_may@unc.edu. Fore more information about the process, visit www.marrow.org.
For those attending, parking is available in the Morehead Planetarium Visitor Parking Lot.
People who are unable to attend Wednesday's event at Morehead Planetarium can participate in the Be The MatchSM online drive. Join the national registry by visiting www.marrow.org and click the join now tab and follow the online instructions. Use the promotion code tarheel when finalizing your registration.
UNC News Services
CHAPEL HILL -- Volunteers and organizations at UNC are uniting to challenge 1,000 people from the university and Chapel Hill communities to join the Be The MatchSM Registry during a drive scheduled from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday in the faculty lounge at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.
Each year, more than 100,000 Americans are diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma and other diseases that may require a life-saving bone marrow or stem cell transplant. The Be The MatchSM Registry is the only hope for the 70 percent of patients needing a marrow transplant who do not have a matching donor in their family. Less than 4 in 10 patients receive the transplant they need, in many cases because no matching donor can be found.
Some of these patients, such as UNC Arts and Sciences Foundation Director Jamie May, live nearby. May, who also is senior associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) in 2005. He is a patient of UNC Lineberger faculty member Peter Voorhees, and may need a bone marrow transplant in the future.
May and his wife Lanier live in Chapel Hill and both work for UNC. He is originally from Atlanta, graduated from Davidson College and served with the U.S. Army in South Vietnam. He has four children: Jamie (Carolina Law), Ben, Rachel and Hal.
More than 100 patients receive bone marrow transplants each year at the N.C. Cancer Hospital.
That's why volunteers from various offices at UNC, including Phi Gamma Delta, the College of Arts and Sciences Foundation, the UNC chapter of the Student National Medical Association (SNMA) and UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, have banded together to issue a challenge to the UNC and Chapel Hill communities to join the registry.
The Be The MatchSM Registry offers people the opportunity to help a patient by registering to be a potential donor of bone marrow or stem cells. Anyone between the ages of 18 and 60 who meets the health guidelines and is willing to donate to any patient in need may join the registry.
The registration process takes only about 15 minutes and requires just a simple health history, contact information and a signed agreement to join, along with a swab of cheek cells. Volunteers are asked to provide personal identification and contact information for two family members or friends who will know how to reach you in the future if your contact information changes.
Although the Be The MatchSM Registry is one of the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse registries of its kind in the world, with more than 8 million potential donors, the combination of an increasingly diverse society and the precise matching criteria for transplantation means that more volunteers are always needed and welcome. Since its founding in 1987, the registry has facilitated more than 38,000 transplants to give patients a second chance at life.
