It is the 86th case of a Taiwanese person giving marrow to save the life of a compatriot of the Chinese Mainland.

Chen Xia, the girl aged 22 who will receive the transplant operation, said she is confident about the operation. The donor, whose name is not yet known, is 25 years old, 176 cm high and 75 kg in weight. He gave 1025 cc bone marrow under general anesthesia.

The donor entrusted marrow carriers with a string of amber-colored beads as a blessing gift to the girl, praying for her early recovery from the illness.

The Tzu Chi Taiwan Marrow Donor Registry (TCTMDR), which was responsible for supplying the marrow is the third largest of its kind in the world.

The match rate for same-type marrow between receiver and donor is one in ten-thousand for family and one in one hundred-thousand among non-relatives, according to medical experts.

But a lot of leukemia sufferers on the Mainland have found their match types among Taiwanese people, largely because a major proportion of Taiwanese or their parents came to the island from south China decades ago, said Lee Chengtao, director of TCTMDR.

As a result of the same genes, 50 percent of Chinese southerners can find their match type in Taiwan, and the ratio for people in north China is 20 percent, Lee added.

Because direct flights between Taiwan and the Mainland are presently not available, the marrow which was extracted early Wednesday has to travel from Taipei to Shanghai via Hong Kong, and then will be shipped to Suzhou, where Chen Xia's hospital is ready for the transplant.

Chen was diagnosed with leukemia in September last year. Her illness was brought under control after a series of chemotherapy sessions. Chen and her parents came to Beijing for a possible marrow transplant operation, the only way to effect a radical cure of her illness.

Being the only child in her family, Chen had little hope, or a one in one hundred-thousand possibility, of finding marrow to match.

With the help of Lu Daopei, an expert in hemopathy (blood illnesses) and marrow transplant who contacted Lee Chengtao of TCTMDR, Chen's search for marrow was echoed by TCTMDR last March, and the man who had registered for possible donation was reached in April.

According to weather forecasts by the China Meteorological Center in Beijing, it is overcast and rainy in all four cities: Taipei, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Suzhou, the destinations of the marrow's long journey, which may delay the operation.

The operation must be completed within 20 hours of the marrow being extracted from the donor, according to experts. Chen's operation is expected to be done at 7:30 pm and finish at 11:30 pm, sources said.

The first such operation took place in April 1997, in which marrow from a 54-year old Taiwanese women was transplanted into a 17-year old boy.

Another remarkable transplant case happened on September 22, 1999, the day following a disastrous earthquake hit Taiwan. On that day the TCTMDR was expected to send marrow to a hospital in east China's Zhejiang Province, but nobody was sure if the donor would come for the marrow extraction amid frequent strong aftershocks.

Finally the center saw the arrival of the donor by a self-paid flight, and doctors and the donor completed the marrow extraction operation during a strong quake of 5 magnitudes on the Richter Scale.

Lee Chengtao, reputed as the "parent of blood serum" in Taiwan, came back to Taiwan in 1992 to set up the first Chinese marrow reserve information center.

During his work in the United States after he graduated with a doctorate from Rutgers University in the United States, Lee was sad to see many Chinese leukemia patients dying owing to rarely finding marrow matches with westerners.

In 1993, Lee founded the Tzu Chi Taiwan Marrow Donor Registry (TCTMDR) in Hualien in the west of Taiwan, with the help of Master Zheng Yan, a famous monk devoted to social charity in Taiwan.

The TCTMDR has developed to become the largest Chinese marrow reserve with 200,000 registered volunteer donors, for Chinese leukemia patients in North America, Western Europe and Southeast Asia.

To date, the center has donated marrow to other regions over 250 times.

(China Daily 06/13/2001)