Taiwan's biggest charity, the Buddhist Compassionate Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, was instrumental yesterday in enabling a 26-year-old Taiwan man to donate 1,305cc of bone marrow for transplant to a woman in China.
Doctors at the foundation's medical center in Hualien extracted the bone marrow from the donor early in the morning for immediate delivery to Suzhou in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu for the transplant operation.
Four Tzu Chi volunteers started the 15-hour journey to deliver the bone marrow from Hualien to Suzhou via Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai immediately after the tissue was extracted from the donor.
The marrow was scheduled to arrive at a Suzhou hospital at 10pm yesterday, where a medical team will transplant the tissue to the 21-year-old mainland woman, who suffers from acute leukemia and needs the bone marrow transplant to survive.
This was the 86th Tzu Chi-mediated bone marrow donation to China. The foundation has so far mediated 280 cross-border bone marrow donations to 15 countries around the world.
RSS