Finding a Match, and a Mission: Helping Blacks Survive Cancer

Skylar Posting # 4
5/14/12 Health
by Donald G. McNeil Jr.
2 pages

Seun Adebiyi a Nigerian 28 year-old experienced a twisted turn of events a month after his commendable graduation from Yale Law School in 2009. Adebiyi graduated from such a prestigious program only to find that the worst was not yet over. Adebiyi was diagnosed with two blood cancers, lymphoblastic lymphoma and stem cell leukemia. If he wanted to survive, and obviously he did... finding a donor immediately was crucial. Wasting no time, Adebiyi took it upon himself to find himself a match. He called on anyone who was willing to safe his life, he took a trip to Nigeria, he went on the radio circuit and youtube. He was lucky enough to eventually find a donor living in the states that donated the umbilical cord of her son to a “cord bank” and the stem cells the cord contained were similar enough to work for Adebiyi. Adebiyi received treatment soon after and has been in remission ever since. Through his experience, Adebiyi was able to gain some knowledge about other black people that have similar misfortunes. In the U.S., less then 20% of African Americans don’t find a donor match and 70% of white Americans do. Though the U.S. is 12.6% African American only 8% of the donors registered are African American and in Nigeria millions of individuals have blood cancers and close to none of them find relief for the same reason, lack of donors. The reason for lack of donors is concluded by some doctors in the field, the Tuskegee scandal in which African American farmers were used as a research experiment and contracted syphilis and were refused treatment. With such terrible past experiences to go off of, who would want to donate? All and all, because there are less registered African American donors in the U.S, and even fewer in Nigeria, black people are not being given fair odds for survival. To make things worse, black people happen to be far more genetically diverse then white people due to ancient migration patterns making it even harder to find a match if you’re black and don’t have any European lineage. With these sort of odds, Adebiyi was driven to start a cord-blood bank in Nigeria. Adebiyi wants to make the donation process as smooth and painless as possible for his donators and wouldn’t object to having them receive a modest reimbursement. Adebiyi has already put fourth $32,000 of his own savings for projects like the blood-bank project and doesn’t expect anything in return. He claims that he was already repaid when his life was saved. I think that Adebiyi’s ideas and drive show were well reflected in the write up on his plans and ambitions for his blood-bank. It makes anyone smile to know that somewhere people’s lives are being saved.