New rules shutter St. Luke’s bone marrow donor program

New rules from the National Marrow Donor Program requiring better representation of minority donors is forcing St. Luke’s Medical Center to shut down its Mountain States Tumor Institute’s Bone Marrow Donor Program.

  NMDP instituted the requirement this year, calling for at least 1,000 minority donors a year or the addition of staff to recruit and coordinate minority donors. The St. Luke’s program was the only one in the Treasure Valley after St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center closed its bone marrow donor program in April.

  “There really wasn’t an alternative,” said St. Luke’s spokesman Ken Dey. “They put the new national mandate down and there was just no way we could meet it with the demographic makeup of the region. ... The amount of effort it would have taken to get those kinds of numbers – it wouldn’t be feasible with the staff we have here.”

  According to a Wednesday release from St. Luke’s, 10,000 Americans rely on bone marrow transplants each year for treatment of life-threatening diseases. Of those 10,000 only 30 percent find a compatible donor in their own family – the rest need to find a match through donor programs. Because tissue types are inherited, patients who share a race or ethnicity with donors often stand a better chance of finding a suitable match.

  St. Luke’s has been operating its bone marrow donor program since 1991, and in that time has positively matched 120 donors with patients suffering from diseases like leukemia, lymphoma and others.

  Following the closure, St. Luke’s officials said their program will likely be consolidated with the Inland Northwest Blood Center in Spokane, Wash. That means those in the Treasure Valley wishing to donate bone marrow will have to enroll online and pay a one-time fee of $52 for the required DNA testing kit.

  “It’s not an option we would have preferred obviously, we were a small program, that’s the bottom line,” Dey said.

  The closure of the donor program will not affect St. Luke’s MSTI’s Blood and Marrow Transplant Program, and Dey said the hospital plans to continue efforts to recruit donors.

   “We’ll still do some community drives, so that’s something we’ll do throughout the year even though we won’t have an official program,” he said.

On Saturday, Aug. 9, though, those between the ages of 18 and 60 who are interested in registering as a bone marrow donor can do so for free at the City Hall Plaza in downtown Boise from 9 a.m. till 4 p.m. The drive is sponsored by the National Donor Marrow Program, the Inland Northwest Blood Center, Group One, St. Alphonsus and St. Luke’s.