Mixed race: Fastest growing demographic in CanadaPosted in Articles, Canada, Health/Medicine/Genetics, Media Archive on 2012-06-25 02:37Z by Steven |
Mixed race: Fastest growing demographic in Canada
The Province
Vancouver, British Columbia
2012-06-24
…And the hardest in the world to find a match for blood cells; one in millions, literally
Brutal. Intensive. Without hope. Those are words that just don’t translate when you hear the voice of 14-year-old Lourdess Sumners, of Duncan.
She’s a happy teen who liberally sprinkles her speech with giggles and words like, “Gee . . . Woo-hoo! . . . No big whup.”
You’d never know she’s spent half her young life facing death, with survival chances many times lower than other children, because of her diverse genetic makeup.
She was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive cancer of the blood and bone marrow, in 2006. She endured eight months of chemotherapy, seemed to beat the fast-growing cancer, but relapsed.
The doctors at Children’s Hospital in Vancouver said her last hope was a life-saving bone marrow transplant.
The medical process is harrowing enough for any child. But with a Filipino and Caucasian background, doctors could not find Lourdess a bone marrow match, after several worldwide searches.
As a child of mixed race—the fastest growing demographic in Canada, and especially B.C.—she is representative of a demographic group that is disadvantaged, in terms of medical blood work…
Read the entire article here.