World Marrow Donor Day (WMDD) is a special day celebrated globally on the third Saturday of September. This year it was held on Saturday, 19 September 2020.
From 17 to 19 September, in the run-up to WMDD, medical volunteers joined the awareness-raising campaign to assist the patients in need of bone marrow transplants. An event was held in cooperation with Omsk Blood Bank.
The first activity was the training of junior medical students, where experienced volunteers presented the basics of donorship. Volunteers set up the info points explaining who could donate, what a typing test is, and also dispelled the common myths about the procedure. Special information booklets on donation were distributed among the participants. In addition, the sessions dedicated to Bone Marrow Donation were carried out for schoolchildren aimed at increasing the medical literacy and social responsibility of the young generation. Albina BERGOTOVA, the Regional Coordinator for Donor Program Promotion, notes that the main task was to raise public awareness of a bone marrow donation: “It is very important to tell people that this fairly simple procedure can save the lives of many patients with malignant blood diseases, for whom the only treatment is a bone marrow transplant. The need for bone marrow and blood donations during a pandemic is particularly acute.”
OSMU Press Center