Assessment of barriers to bone marrow donation by unrelated African-American potential donors

African Americans have a lower registration rate for becoming potential bon e marrow and stem cell donors. The same attitudes and behaviors are exhibit ed in regard to solid organ and blood donations, causing a serious underrep resentation of the African-American population in the donor pool. In our ef forts to increase donor availability for African Americans through a projec t funded by the Medical University of South Carolina, we used a survey to d etermine the reasons African Americans do nor participate as donors for bon e marrow, We surveyed 589 African Americans, a great majority of whom were women. Our survey identified major barriers to donation to be the lack of a wareness that transplantation can save lives, the cost of donation, and the lack of opportunities to donate. The most effective interventions in incre asing donation have been to provide both educational programs preceding mar row drives and the opportunity to donate. Through these efforts, the number of potential African-American donors has increased from 768 (accrued over a period of 12 years) to 1977 in less than 2 years. We conclude that a mino rity recruitment program targeting African-American volunteers for the Nati onal Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) should include an education component addr essing the most common barriers before drives.