Idaho Facility to End Bone Marrow Program

Officials at St. Luke’s Mountain States Tumor Institute in Boise say the facility is shutting down it’s bone-marrow donor registry because it can’t meet new standards for adding hundreds of potential minority donors a year.

New standards requiring more than 500 potential minority donors be added annually were recently set by the National Marrow Donor Program based in Minneapolis.

Officials at St. Luke’s say they will shut down the program in September.

Mark Allen, the institute’s Marrow Donor Center coordinator, says the demographics of the region make it impossible to recruit 1,000 minority bone marrow donors.

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