Hawai'i helps Guam look for marrow donor
By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer
A team of Hawai'i experts flew to Guam yesterday to open the territory's first bone marrow drive in an effort to save the life of a 5-year-old Guam girl who is battling cancer.
Roy Yonashiro, bone marrow donor recruitment coordinator at St. Francis Medical Center, was in the group that left Hawai'i to seek a bone marrow match for a possible transplant for the girl.
Justice Taitague would have a 40 percent of surviving her T-cell lymphoma with a bone marrow transplant. Without a transplant, doctors say she has six months to live.
The child, Justice Taitague, is of Chamorro and Filipino ancestry, and The National Marrow Donor Program agreed that the best chance of finding a donor match for her would be in Guam, where she was born.
The goal will be to increase the donor registry in Guam in hopes of finding a donor with compatible bone marrow.
The girl, who is at the Loma Linda University Children's Hospital in California, has T-cell lymphoma, is failing to respond sufficiently to chemotherapy and is about to undergo radiation therapy, according to Dr. Thomas Shieh, president of the Guam Medical Society.
There is only a 1-in-20,000 chance of finding a match but doctors say that without a transplant, the girl has no more than six months to live, according to the Pacific Daily News. With a transplant, she'd have a 40 percent chance of surviving.
