The family of a 6-year-old adopted Chinese girl who desperately needs a bone marrow transplant believes they have found a match in China.
Kailee Wells suffers from severe aplastic anemia, which prevents bone marrow from producing new blood cells. She has taken courses of chemotherapy but has shown little sign of remission.
The best help for such patients is a transplant of healthy marrow or blood stem cells from a suitable donor. Certain tissue traits of the patient and donor must match.
Kailee's mother, Linda Wells, made her second trip to China earlier this month to find a donor. Her husband, Owen Wells, said Saturday that his wife believes doctors there have found a match.
"For these last 22 months, we've been living in fear that Kailee would take a turn for the worse and there would be nothing we could do about it," he told Albuquerque television station KOAT. "Now we have something we can use and save our little girl. We are just about ready to start jumping up and down and rejoicing."
Wells said a Chinese girl who is about a year old has a cord blood sample that matches Kailee's perfectly. The next step, he said, would be to make sure the sample is safely harvested and protected for transplant, the details of which have yet to be worked out.
Owen Wells said his wife had been giving him updates about the match over the phone and via email for the last eight hours.
Linda Wells first traveled to China in February to try to locate the girl's birth mother since relatives are most likely to be a match. But she found no relatives and decided to try again this month.
"This gives us so much motivation because now we found what we thought we would never be able to find for Kailee," Owen Wells said. "We're going to continue our world donor drive to try to continue to help as many people as we possibly can. We're just so happy."
(China Daily November 17, 2003)
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