Essex County Teacher Needs Bone Marrow Donor For Son

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — A teacher in Essex County is asking for the community’s help finding a matching bone marrow donor for her son Owen, who was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia in April.

Owen’s mother, Dakashna Bahadur Lang, is a teacher in the Livingston Public School District, administrators stated.

Learn more about how you can help and see a GoFundMe campaign established by the family here.

According to the campaign:

“In early April, Owen Bahadur Lang was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia. It is a rare disease in which the bone marrow stops making enough blood cells: red blood cells that carry oxygen throughout the body, white blood cells that fight infection and platelets that help stop bleeding. The only guaranteed, permanent way to fix this condition is a bone marrow transplant.”

Lang’s family continued:

“We need your help to find a bone marrow donor who is a perfect match for Owen. Genetics and ethnicity play a role in who might be a match. Unfortunately, only 4% of the 12.5 million people registered in the National Bone Marrow Donor Program are (like Owen) categorized as mixed race.”

It takes about four weeks for someone who registers with the National Bone Marrow Donor Program to enter the database and show up in searches by transplant centers, the family wrote.

“Anyone might be a match, but some human leukocyte antigen (HLA) markers are harder to match because they tend to be more frequently found in groups that aren’t well represented in the national and international donor registries. These groups include mixed race people, South Asians, Asian-Americans and African-Americans.”

Family members are now reaching out to “all groups of people,” but also trying to recruit potential donors who are South Asian, Indo-Caribbean or come from a mixed background. Owen is half white (with roots in England, Wales and Germany) and half South Asian Caribbean (with roots in Guyana).

“Our goal is to increase the number of people on the national and international registries who might be a perfect match for Owen by the time we next meet the transplant doctor, in September 2017,” the family wrote.

ABOUT OWEN

According to the GoFundMe campaign:

“Owen is a very clever, beautiful six-year-old obsessed with dinosaurs and soccer (Tottenham is his team). Some days he wants to be a paleontologist; other days, he wants to be the next Christiano Ronaldo or Harry Kane. During multiple hospital stays in recent months, Owen learned chess and Scrabble. He's been trouncing his family at both. He is observant, sensitive and shy, though he's been surprisingly the extrovert with the nurses, doctors and child life specialists he's charmed at Newark Beth Israel these past few months.

“Owen lives with his family in New Jersey. He's son to Dakashna Bahadur Lang, an 8th grade English literature teacher, and Matthew Lang, a network systems engineer. And he's big brother to a 2-year old who shadows his every gesture and his every mischief. We call the two of them Hurricane and Tornado.”

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Photo: GoFundMe