World Marrow Donor Day

September 18 marks World Marrow Donor Day. This day has been celebrated every third Saturday in September since 2015 to remind the importance of enrolling in the registers of voluntary hematopoietic stem cell donors, donating umbilical cord blood stem cells, and thanking all the wonderful people who took the time to donate a part of themselves to the sick to save their lives.
To motivate and remind you of the importance of donating hematopoietic stem cells, either by donating bone marrow or peripheral stem cells or by donating umbilical cord blood stem cells to the Ana Rukavina Public Cord Blood Bank, you can read World Marrow Donor Association, the Croatian Bone Marrow Donor Registry and the Ana Rukavina Foundation statistics below:
• The WMDA, of which the Croatian Registry is a member, today has a total of 39,329,022 potential donors of hematopoietic stem cells (38,523,545 potential donors and 805,477 doses of umbilical cord blood).
• 61,199 number of potential donors registered in the Croatian Registry (60,833 HLA typed samples).
• 3,677 doses of umbilical cord blood donated to the public Ana Rukavina Public Cord Blood Bank, which were HLA typed and entered in the WMDA database.
• Since 2009, when the first unrelated transplant from the Croatian Registry was performed, to date, 139 transplants have been performed from the Croatian Registry (98 for patients from Croatia and 41 for patients from abroad).
• Out of a total of 139 transplants, 6 were from donated umbilical cord blood doses to the Ana Rukavina Public Cord Blood Bank (1 umbilical cord blood dose was transplanted for a sick person in Croatia, and 5 for sick people from abroad).
• In 2021, to date, 12 hematopoietic stem cell transplants have been performed by donors from the Croatian Registry, of which 9 transplants were donated to sick people from Croatia, and 3 to sick people from abroad.
Brave, selfless, and big-hearted, 139 donors from the Croatian Bone Marrow Donor Registry helped to save 139 people and their families across Croatia and the world.
A big thank you from all of us from the Ana Rukavina Foundation and sincere congratulations to the donors on the occasion of the World Marrow Donor Day!