Three-year-old with leukemia: stem cell donor wanted

“My child has cancer.” This sentence begins director Sara Ostertag’s appeal on Instagram, which has only one goal: to find a “perfect match” for her three-year-old daughter, who suffers from leukemia. A stem cell donation can save the child’s life. She is one of around 80 children who develop leukemia in Austria every year. In Linz, on October 12th and October 13th, they are trying to find this “perfect match” for the three-year-old and of course other sick people so that they have a future.

People aged between 18 and 35 years old will provide a saliva sample on October 12th, which will then be stored in a global database in order to possibly find the “perfect match”. The chance that two people have matching tissue characteristics is 1:500,000. Only ten percent of all those registered are contacted as potential donors. The stem cell registration campaigns in Linz are supervised by the Red Cross.

There will be another such campaign on Friday, October 13th from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. at WeFair, the trade fair for sustainable coexistence at the Linz Design Center.

In Sara Ostertag’s case, July 27th of this year was the day everything changed. She took her daughter to the pediatrician because she had a bit of a fever and wanted to be clear about what she had.

A blood test followed and the devastating result that the three-year-old had leukemia. After being admitted to the St. Anna Children’s Hospital in Vienna, it only took another day for the little girl to receive her first chemotherapy treatment. Many more followed, and will continue to do so in the coming months. According to doctors’ estimates, the three-year-old’s treatment will last around one and a half years.

The hope of those affected lies in a stem cell donation. To do this, a suitable donor must first be found. In order for the transplant to be successful and for the body not to reject the foreign stem cells, all blood-forming immune cells in the patient’s body must first be destroyed. As a result, they no longer have any protection against pathogens.

The theater director also has to be careful not to infect her daughter. That turned life upside down. The little one is not allowed to have contact with other children, which means there is no kindergarten and no theater rehearsals or meetings, to which Ostertag always took her daughter with her. None of this will work for a while.

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