The fictional death of a child in an RTE drama series on Monday evening, when a compatible donor could not be found to give him a life-saving bone-marrow transplant, has resulted in an upsurge in calls to the Blood Transfusion Service Board from people willing to become donors.
Yesterday, after the final episode of Relative Strangers was broadcast, the BTSB received over 100 calls from members of the public interested in becoming bone-marrow donors, more than the total received during the whole of last year. RTE says the episode was watched by nearly 750,000 people.
Ms Deirdre Healy of the BTSB said the programme had given the Irish Bone Marrow Registry a great boost. "Anything that can inform people of the need for bone-marrow donors and indeed blood donors is wonderful," she said.
She confirmed that there were already 12,000 people on the Irish Unrelated Bone Marrow Registry, which lists the names of those willing to donate bone marrow to strangers. Some might never be called upon, but the wider the pool of donors the more likely it was that patients needing a transplant would be able to find a successful match, she said.
Forty-seven people on the registry gave bone marrow to Irish patients last year, while 17 donated to patients in Europe, Australia and the US, which necessitated their travelling to the site of the operation.
Ms Healy said the BTSB registry was affiliated to the World Bone Marrow Registry, and if somebody as far away as New Zealand needed a transplant, the tissue-typing of people willing to donate in Ireland would be looked at in the search for a compatible donor.
Bone-marrow transplantation is the only curative therapy for some acquired malignant conditions, such as leukaemia, and for inherited metabolic disorders.