A lady in Singapore is beseeching members of the public to register themselves as bone marrow donors after her friend was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia — a cancer where the bone marrow makes too many immature lymphocytes, a type of white blood cells. 

Because these abnormal white blood cells crowd out a person's red blood cells (which carry oxygen) and platelets (which aid clotting of the blood), a person suffering from lymphoblastic leukaemia becomes highly susceptible to infections, anaemia, bruising and sustained bleeding.

This is her Facebook post:

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The difficulty of finding a match

Patients in need of bone marrow transplants often face challenging circumstances — the chance of finding a match in someone else is slim enough at 1 in 20,000 on average.

These odds become even lower when you are of a minority ethnicity.

In an interview with The New Paper, a haematologist Lim Zi Yi said finding a bone marrow match depends on the donor and recipient's human leukocyte antigen types (in simple terms, how your body's immune system responds to new things being introduced to it).

He added that the chances of finding a fully-matched and unrelated blood marrow donor are greatly influenced by ethnicity.

According to Huang, who posted the plea, her friend Kumar only has a 4 per cent chance of finding a local donor, because she is of Indian ethnicity.

Her own brother is only a 50 per cent match.

Members of the public who are healthy, between 17 to 49 years old, and wish to help may register the Bone Marrow Donor Programme (BMDP) here. 

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