New Yorkers! Rally behind Jennifer Jones Austin!
The Brooklyn-based mother, lawyer and family advocate has been stricken with Acute Myeloid Leukemia and has become the face of a city-wide blood and bone marrow drive in conjunction with New York Blood Center (NYBC) and The City University of New York (CUNY).
After feeling tired, believing it was just a virus, Jennifer was diagnosed. Once she confirmed, unfortunately, that her siblings were not a match for a transplant, she turned to the “Be The Match” blood drive going on now at Borough of Manhattan Community College.
According to statistics, only 10% of the donors registered with the National Marrow Donor Program are African American, and the changes for a match improve greatly when race and ethnic synergies exist. This is a grim stat and calls for African Americans to stand up and be counted in the bone marrow registry! What better way to help your community than this?
We’ve seen this before, as reflected in an article in our e-newsletter, “Multirace matches a problem in bone marrow transplants. ”
Help Jennifer out, won’t you? Here is the article, and the details for registering with “Be The Match.”