Give the Gift of Life This Holiday Season at
Community Blood Services� Blood/Bone Marrow Drive
in Ridgewood

December 19, 2014

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The Village of Ridgewood, in partnership with The HLA Registry at Community Blood Services, is hosting a blood and bone marrow registration drive on Friday, December 19 at the Fire Department Headquarters, 201 East Glen Avenue from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The public is invited join the national Be The Match bone marrow registry through The HLA Registry by taking 10 minutes to get a simple cheek swab and fill out a short form. To register you must be 18-44 years of age and willing to donate for any patient in the world. Blood donors can contact Dawn at [email protected] to schedule an appointment to donate at the blood drive.

�The best gift you can give this holiday season is the gift of life,� said Karen Ferriday, community affairs director at Community Blood Services.� Your blood donation or registration as a potential stem cell donor could help patients like Ridgewood�s own Anthony Daniels who is fighting cancer and looking for his lifesaving stem cell match.�

Anthony, a 2009 Ridgewood High School graduate, has been valiantly fighting Hodgkin�s lymphoma but needs a bone marrow stem cell transplant to cure his disease. A drive held in Ridgewood last December to help Anthony find his cure registered more than 500 donors and found matches for 10 patients in need but Anthony is still looking for his match.

Every day, thousands of adults and children like Anthony are diagnosed with lymphoma, aplastic anemia, leukemia, sickle cell anemia and other serious diseases that require stem cell transplants as a cure. Like Anthony, 70 percent of those patients will not find matches within their own families and must turn to the national registry to find their donor matches.

To donate, donors must be healthy, 17-75 years old (16 years old with parental permission) and weigh at least 110 pounds. When they donate, each blood donor will receive a free mini-health screening, including non-fasting cholesterol and glucose, iron count and blood pressure.

Community Blood Services has been serving the community for more than 60 years. It supplies lifesaving blood and blood products to more than 18 hospitals in New Jersey and New York, including The Valley Hospital, HackensackUMC and St. Joseph's Healthcare System in Paterson/Wayne.