This Sunday, 12th Adar, marks 25 years since Sue Harris lost her battle with leukaemia.
Five years earlier, shortly after her 30th birthday, she had been rushed into hospital and received the blood cancer diagnosis. With no siblings, and in need of a bone marrow donor to save her life, she would need to find a suitable unrelated donor.
The biology of bone marrow, or as is it now called stem cell, donation centres on matching the HLA typing that each of us has. At its core are six numbers, rather like the lottery but, unlike your blood group, HLA type is influenced by ethnic origin. A Jewish patient with blood cancer is therefore more likely to find a match from a Jewish stem cell donor.
When Sue was diagnosed, there were only 48 Jewish donors on the national register. So her friendship group, comprising former campus activists, launched a campaign to recruit donors.
Very quickly the face of this young, bubbly and funny woman was all around the community. Well, as quickly as it could be in pre-internet days. Advertisements appeared in this paper, leaflets were sent to two hundred synagogues in time for Yom Kippur and Sue made speeches at 150 communal events. Her heart-rending message was simple: “my name is Sue Harris, I need a bone marrow donor to save my life and it could be you.”
By the end of her campaign, Sue had recruited over 15,000 Jewish donors to the national register. Tragically, she was to endure a not uncommon fate: her first donor pulled out a few days before the transplant; her second came too late to save her life.
In the final days before she lost her fight, Sue asked her friends not to forget her. For 25 years, we have tried to do so much more. We wanted her legacy to be one of giving life to others.
We began by helping other Jewish patients, counselling them on their options and recruiting more donors. We quickly realised though that the real potential lay in Israel, so we helped to establish what is now one of the world’s most populated registers. Israel has per head of population ten times the stem cell donors of the UK. The result is that today, a Jewish patient anywhere in the world with blood cancer and needing a stem cell donor, has a far better chance of finding a match than any other ethnic minority patient.
A charitable trust set up in Sue’s name has been instrumental in advancing the use of umbilical cord blood which, rich in stem cells, would otherwise be thrown away. The trust funded a health economics study used to determine the UK national strategy on cord blood. It opened a cord blood collection centre in Sue’s name at the Royal Free Hospital and also sponsored the first clinical trial of cord blood in this country, which has already led to many more lives being saved.
More recently, the trust has become a driving force in seeking to improve the options in the UK for other minority ethnic patients with blood cancer. Indeed, Sue’s campaign is an exemplar of how to recruit stem cell donors in an ethnic community.
And we’re still doing it today with our annual Jewish Swab Week taking place this week. Fittingly for this yahrzeit, 25 donor recruitment events are being held in Jewish secondary schools, on campus in J-Socs and, culminating on Sunday, at two sems in Gateshead.
May Sue’s memory continue to be a blessing.
Lionel Salama is Secretary of the Sue Harris Trust
