Blood Twins: A perfect match

Sickle cell disease affects 100,000 Americans, whose blood cell shape resembles a crescent moon, instead of being round and healthy. The defective cells don’t carry oxygen, so patients must undergo transfusions. Blood donors exist but they must be a perfect match.

A young Pennsylvania dad who lives a full time life thanks to one of these rare donors is Malick Burrow. He was born with sickle-cell disease, and both of his parents were carriers.

Michelle Erickson, the Medical Director of Blood Resources at WellSpan Health, says “The cells themselves are defective. They stretch into this sickle shape and they won’t move through the blood vessels properly. They can’t get through and deliver oxygen.”

Burrow under goes monthly blood transfusions which remove sickle cells and replace them with healthy red blood cells. His rare blood requires a perfect donor match, known as blood twins.

“Most people think of A, B, and O, and they think of whether you’re positive or negative. Positive or negative means the D antigen. But there are many more blood antigens than just those,” says Erikson.

She says all the blood variants would fill up a phone book, but each one of Burrow’s blood antigens must match those of his blood twin donor or the body reacts. “A patient receiving a poorly matched blood unit would have a blood transfusion reaction and it could be quite severe. It might induce hemolysis, so that those red blood cells would start to pop and break apart.”

Burrow jokingly refers to the blood twin transfusions as his oil change, but he says it is terribly exhausting, physically. “It’s not like hard to where I leave here and I’m exhausted, you know mentally wise.”

He’s determined to set an example for his kids, who carry the sickle cell trait, to never give up. “I try to make it as normal as I can, because if I don’t, then you can go down a mentally wrong spiral.”

Erikson says there’s a blood twin for everybody. “We are looking for those twins to help our special patients.”

Burrow is one of the lucky ones who found a blood twin.

Hospitals and blood banks need blood desperately due to aging donors and the effect of Covid-19. You might be the blood twin who makes a real difference. Donors do not need to match ethnicity to be a blood match.