By Melissa Sim

DONATING bone marrow does not hurt. That is the message the Bone Marrow Donor Programme (BMDP) is trying to promote.

Contrary to popular belief, there will not be a large syringe piercing through your spine to get to your marrow. Instead, the process is now as easy as donating blood.

The BMDP, a non-profit group set up here in 1993, has been building a register of Singaporeans who are willing to donate bone marrow to those with blood diseases such as leukaemia. It hopes to bump up the current 50,000 people on the list by 5,000 this year.

A new process, to be introduced here this month, will collect DNA information of potential donors simply by brushing a cotton bud against the inside of their cheeks.

BMDP president Jane Prior said many think they will immediately need to donate their marrow once they sign up, but this is not true. Some on the register may never find a match, given that there is only a one in 20,000 chance of a match within a persons ethnic group.

"Think of the Indoor Stadium full of people," she said. "The patient stands in the middle and says: 'This is my DNA, I need a match. The people there are like the people on our database."

The BMDP, linked to similar groups worldwide, gets 30 local and international requests for matches each month. Only 45 matches were made last year.

If a match is made, there are two ways to donate bone marrow. First, donors can be put under general anaesthetic and the bone marrow can be extracted from the pelvic bone.

The second option is similar to a blood donation. Hormones are injected into the donor for three days, which stimulates bone marrow stem cell production. The donor is then hooked up to a machine which extracts the stem cells from the blood for a day.