The executive director of Ezer Mizion Canada, a non-profit health organization founded in Israel, hopes that its upcoming fundraising event will raise awareness about the importance of a Jewish bone marrow donor registry.
Raquel Benzacar Savatti, Ezer Mizion Canada’s executive director, told The CJN that Canadian Jewish patients in need of a bone marrow transplant are likely to have more difficulty than others finding a match in the Canadian Blood Services Registry because they’re under-represented.
“It’s a numbers game. That’s the bottom line. We know that in Canada we have [fewer than] 400,000 Jews, and of that number… there is really only a certain demographic that is the right age and has good health to be qualified as a potential donor,” Savatti explained.
The division head of general and thoracic surgery at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, Dr. Jacob Langer, who is co-chairing the March 22 Benefit for Life event at the Carlu with his wife Ferne, agreed that the issue stems from the fact that Jews are a small minority.
“I would suspect the low numbers [in Canada for Jewish donors] are not because we’re less likely to donate. I think it is because there are so few of us,” Langer said.
Savatti explained that the likelihood that a patient’s sibling will be a match is 25 per cent, but the likelihood that the match will come from someone of the same ethnic background is 99 per cent.
In 1998, Ezer Mizion established its own bone marrow donor registry and today, it’s the largest Jewish one and the fourth-largest registry in the world.
Savatti said that in 2009, the Israel Defence Forces agreed to offer its new recruits an opportunity to get swabbed and register with Ezer Mizion as part of the IDF induction process.
“Since then, the registry has grown exponentially. We now have over 750,000 samples of active donors in the registry,” Savatti said. “We’ve got an arsenal of the best – young and healthy potential donors.”
Ned Nasi, a Toronto Jewish father to a 21-year-old son who was diagnosed with leukemia in October, understands more than most how important registries like Ezer Mizion are.
After learning that his son would need a bone marrow transplant as part of his treatment and discovering that his other son wasn’t a match, he began to search registries around the world.
“We were told that there are two important things that play a role in finding a good match,” said Nasi, a Jew who moved to Toronto from Turkey five years ago. “One is genetic background and the other is the geography that you come from. In that case, we had two populations to draw from – one was the Turkish population and one was the Jewish population.”
Last month, Nasi was told by his son’s doctors that a match had been found, although they weren’t able to disclose where it came from.
Langer said Jewish patients are most likely to find a match through Ezer Mizion, and the more Jews that are registered, the higher the chance a Jewish patient can find a life-saving match.
Savatti said the registry offers Jews a safety net.
“If the registry reaches a number of 1.2 million active donors, we would have, potentially, a donor for every Jewish patient in the world,” Savatti said.
But that goal requires money.
“[Processing] each DNA test… costs $65… Just to process all the DNA that we get from the soldiers alone, we need about $3 million a year. We can swab everyone and their uncle. But we need the funds to extract that data to get it into the registry.”
The March 22 event, which will feature a keynote address by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, is a step toward that goal.
For more information about Ezer Mizion or to buy tickets, visit ezermizion.org/benefitforlife.
