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The Red Cross Society of China (RCSC) will hold a news conference this afternoon to appeal to the public for help.
Linda Wells, a distraught mother from New Mexico of the United States, will be asking the Chinese public for their assistance in finding a bone marrow donor for her critically ill adopted six-year-old daughter, Kailee.
The adopted girl's only chance to survive severe aplastic anemia is to find her biological family or an alternative donor, said Linda, who arrived in Beijing over the weekend on this desperate mission.
The 50-year-old lawyer said Kailee, also known by her Chinese name of Changban, was adopted from Central China's Hunan Province after being abandoned in Changde in 1997.
She had been "perfectly fine" until days after her fifth birthday, when she was diagnosed with the fatal disease.
"She has a catheter that goes to her chest and heart where she gets medicine everyday... to keep her alive, but to survive, she must have a bone marrow transplant," Linda told China Daily yesterday in Beijing.
American doctors have investigated more than 9 million possible donors through global databases but so far have not found a match, she added.
"That's why we've decided our first place would be to come to her homeland in China," she said.
The chance for a bone marrow match is one out of four among siblings, and only one out of 400 to 10,000 among people with no blood relationship, experts said.
That explains why the bone marrow bank maintained by RCSC, with more than 50,000 samples, did not have a match, said Hong Junling, deputy director of Hematopoietic Stem Cell Donor Programme Administration Centre under the RCSC.
Peng Lifu, deputy secretary-general of the Red Cross Society in Hunan -- Kailee's birthplace -- said his agency would do all it could to help.
However, other local sources said the chances of finding the girl's biological family were low as there is little information available.
"I understand it is very difficult, and probably unlikely (to find the biological family or a match)... but we have to try everything, because I want our daughter to live. I want to ask her birth mother to please help me save Kailee," Linda said.
Both the Wells and Linda's sister Paige Andre-Hudson said they hoped people would become more aware of the importance of bone marrow registry -- not just for Kailee, but for many other people who need bone marrow transplants to survive.
Hong of the RCSC said his agency is doing everything possible to help the American mother find a match.
(Hotline of RCSC: 010-65126600)
(China Daily February 18, 2003)
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