At the action to join the Registry which was held on Saturday, October 25th, with the help of the Committee on Health and Social Welfare of the Marija Bistrica Municipality and Dr. Sanja Kovačić, the Registry was expanded by a total of 48 voluntary donors of hematopoietic stem cells.
Our heartfelt thank you goes to the Committee on Health and Social Welfare of Marija Bistrica Municipality and Dr. Sanja Kovačić, who initiated the action and helped with the organization. Our thanks also go to the chief administrator of the municipality, Mr. Josip Milić, who supported the action, Assistant Professor Dr. Rajko Fureš, D.Sc., head of Gynecology and Obstetrics at the Zabok General Hospital, who held a short presentation on donating hematopoietic stem cells to the public Bank together with the Head of the Registry, Dr. Mirta Mikulić, D.Sc., who informed everybody on what it means to be a potential bone marrow donor, to all the nurses and doctors who helped both with the organization of the action and during the action itself, and obviously to all the young people who joined the Registry and thus increased the chances of those suffering from serious diseases to recover from them.
Also, it is with great pleasure to inform you that another 1,015 blood samples from potential hematopoietic stem cell donors have been tissue typed using the molecular method for four HLA loci: A, B, C and DRB1. This has brought the number of tissue typed samples of potential donors to 43,274.
As always, we are grateful to both the current and previous Government of the Republic of Croatia which has allocated funds in the budget to enable us to get closer to our goal, which is tissue typing all of the collected blood samples so that the Croatian Registry is operational and accessible to search for non-related bone marrow and stem cell donors.
We are sincerely grateful to all of you who by joining the Registry have decided to help all those in need of stem cell transplantation, as well as the organizers of our actions who have made the effort to organize activities throughout Croatia.