'Life or death' for patients amid lack of blood donors

Patients in Australia face a "life or death" situation if they need a stem cell match due to a critical shortage of blood donors, a cancer organisation has warned. There are about 1000 Australians urgently waiting for a living stem cell match, also known as a bone marrow match, at any one time, according to the Australian Bone Marrow Donor Registry (ABMDR). Roughly 90 per cent of those are blood cancer patients. But ABMDR's data reveals that Australia has just 158,000 registered donors, compared to over seven million in Germany and at least 42 million donors worldwide. "It simply is life or death," says Sophie Patnicroft Gray who received a stem cell transplant after she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) in 2019. "Chemotherapy alone would not help cure me, I had to have a stem cell transplant as an only resort." She told AAP that a friend could only find a donor overseas which added to the stress of treatment. "To have (my) donor within Australia meant that we didn't have to worry about flights getting cancelled, or a pandemic, or something happening overseas." According to ABMDR, Australia's stem cell import rate has risen from 73 per cent in 2022 to 80 per cent in September 2024. Between January and June in 2024, the organisation registered less than 10,000 donors. But federal government recommendations on donor recruitment in December suggested there needed to be between 25,000 and 40,000 new donors joining the registry every year to keep up with the increased demand. Leukaemia Foundation's Tim Murphy told AAP that a key issue for patients was getting stuck on a waiting list because the pool of matches in the country did not reflect the population. "We have 120 different ethnic groups in our country, and our donor pool doesn't reflect that." Mr Murphy said that left Australian patients increasingly dependent on overseas donors. Both the foundation and ABMDR are encouraging Australians from all cultures between the ages of 18 and 35 to register.