And it’s really easy to become a bone-marrow donor. It’s just a mouth swab; it’s not even a blood test. You just do a mouth swab and they can check your type your bone marrow type from a mouth swab.
Then there’s a National bone marrow registry and they will match a patient to the DNA and the mouth swab and if they call you to be a donor, that’s easy too. You go to your local your local clinic that does the bone marrow harvest and we don’t do bone marrow biopsies for harvesting anymore. It’s just like giving plasma.
So, they’re stem cells floating in our blood all the time and what you do when you donate for a bone marrow transplant, they put an IV in your arm and you just donate blood and the blood goes through a filter which captures the stem cells, which then goes to the patient. So, there’s no bone marrow biopsy, there’s only one needle involved in being a bone marrow donor and that’s just in the arm.
Is there a cost?
There is no cost. So, all the cost accrued for being a bone marrow donor goes to the patient’s insurance company.