China's youngest bone marrow donor, a 19-year-old college student in southeast China's Fujian Province, donated marrow last Thursday for a young soldier suffering from leukemia in Beijing.  

Zhang Liangjian, a sophomore majoring in business administration at Nanyang College in Xiamen City, donated 100 cubic centimeters of bone marrow at the Union Hospital in Fuzhou, the provincial capital.

Collection of the bone marrow lasted for eight hours and the marrow was sent immediately to Beijing on an Air China flight.

Local Red Cross officials said Zhang's donation would be used to save the life of a 20-year-old soldier surnamed Peng, who is struggling with leukemia at a hospital in Beijing.

The best help for a leukemia patient is a transplant of healthy marrow or blood stem cells from a matching donor. Experts say the match occurs only in about 25 percent of brothers and sisters, and a person could find a match from among 400 to 10,000 non-family members.

"I felt like a lottery winner when I was told that my bone marrow matched perfectly with the soldier's," said Zhang.

Zhang registered himself as a voluntary bone marrow donor early this year when he donating blood.

Zhang's parents supported his decision.

"In fact, it was my mother who taught me to love and help others: she adopted a foundling many years ago, though we were not very well off ourselves back then," he said.

He is by far the youngest donor registered at China's bone marrow bank, an organization founded in 1992 to collect samples and locate donors for patients who need a bone marrow transplant.

But the bank is far from enough for the country's leukemia patients, a group that increases by more than 40,000 a year. On China's mainland alone, more than 4 million patients, out of the total population of 1.3 billion, are waiting for stem cell transplants.

In an attempt to deal with the problem, health authorities have called for new rules and regulations to govern umbilical cord banks. The umbilical cord blood of newborn babies is rich in stem cells and should not be thrown away -- which is what happens in many delivery rooms.

(Xinhua News Agency September 12, 2004)