Waiting for life

ENAR

Twenty-one-year-old Peter Dagher has a rare type of leukemia, a form of blood cancer, and he needs a donor of hematopoietic stem cells (often referred to as bone marrow) for the treatment of his life-threatening disease. Members of his family don’t match and nor do his friends, and Lebanon does not have a national registry where he could look for a potential donor. Peter is not alone. The American University of Beirut’s Medical Center (AUBMC) comes across five to six patients a year in need of a such a procedure. Beirut’s Makassed Hospital currently has three patients anxiously awaiting a life-saving donor.  With the absence of a registry where Peter and others like him can search for registered donors, they are left with two options: continue to ask people around them to undertake tests to see if they are a match — with each test costing between $300 to $470