When an 8-year-old boy in Almuñécar needs a bone-marrow donation, volunteers from La Herradura, Almuñécar and Salobreña turn out – Almost 1,200 of them.
Daniel’s parents, Juan Francisco and Mari carmen, thought that some people would respond, but never thought than an army of them would do so on the 13th of March: 1,000 donors from Almuñécar gave blood samples in Edificio Plaza Mayor, where a premises had been chosen for the cause. Donations had begun in La Herraura on the 9th, several days before.
He even received a call from the University of Granada asking how they could help.
In Salobreña another 140 volunteers did the same; the old, the young… there were even some that wanted to but could not because of an illness which disqualified them. The donation point was in the Town Hall building.
To give some perspective to this, more people donated for this cause in one day than there were for bone-marrow donations during 2015.
In 2016, the case of the young boy from Marbella moved the people of Granada and 8,500 registered on the bone-marrow-donors list. Sadly, the boy, Pablo Ráez died.
Salobreña Donors
However, the health authorities are worried by what they term as “emotional donors,” or in other words, a surge of donors who have reacted to the case of a particular patient. The flood of donors overwhelms their capacity to process them. In the case of Almuñécar, for example, nursing staff had to be called in on their day off to back up their overrun colleagues.
The Head of the Andalusian network of transfusion centres, Doctor Salvador Oyonarte, called for donors to be more reflexive; to use their heads rather than their hearts. The problem is, he says, that although they volunteer with all the goodness of their hearts and willingness to give there and then, when a year goes by and they are called to make the donation 70% of those that reacted on impulse refuse to do so.
The fact is that Spanish legislation does not permit the carrying out campaigns for donations for people in particular.
He makes it very clear, however, that the transfusion centres don’t want the donations to stop; the complete opposite. Each ay within the province of Granada five field collections are carried out in different towns – in the case of Andalucía, it 50 collections a day.
In fact, on a national level, Spain has 250,000, healthy, bone-marrow donors on its register, which in turn is linked to the world register with 30-million registered donors, which means that everybody has an equal chance to receive a bone-marrow transplant.
However statistically and realistically, Spain would need 10-million more donors to increase the success rate for bone-marrow transplants to increase by 0.1%.
In he meantime, Daniel is going blind because of a cruel, degenerative disease adrenoleukodystrophy, which you can find out more about by clicking on the diseases name.If you would like to find out how to become a donor you can visit www.transfusion.granada-almeria.org and find out where the next collection near you will be.