The State Duma supported the proposal of the Government of the Russian Federation to create a unified federal register of bone marrow donors in Russia. The corresponding law was adopted in the third reading during the plenary session on Wednesday, April 20. This is reported by the Parlamentskaya Gazeta.
According to Sergey Leonov, Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Committee on Health Protection (the LDPR), five thousand citizens need bone marrow transplants every year, but due to the lack of donors, fewer than two thousand such transplants are made.
“This means that thousands of patients with oncological or hematological diseases lose their chance to survive and defeat the disease. There is only one chance in 10,000 to find a donor, and this not enough, so it is extremely important to expand the register of potential donors,” the publication quotes the parliamentarian as saying.
According to Leonov, after the adoption of the law, the state budget will assume all the costs of finding potential donors, their medical examinations, bone marrow collection and travel expences for the donor.
As it became known earlier, the register will be a detailed, regularly updated database. It will contain information about each donor and each patient in need of transplantation. By using such a database, specialists will be able to find the right donor not only in their region, but also throughout the country. It is the Federal Biomedical Agency that will be responsible for the creation, maintenance and development of the register.