Everyone knows that more and more, patients and their families are turning to the internet for medical information. The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that 61% of American adults look online for health information. Social networks are still only considered a small component of the larger online health information landscape.

Yet for patients like Jonathan, racing against time to find a bone marrow donor to save their life, social networking sites like Facebook have been become a vital resource.

Getting the word out is the key to any successful bone marrow drive, and Facebook has helped other leukemia patients in similar situations to Jonathan’s beat the odds to find the donor the experts said was next to impossible to do.

Twenty-eight-year old Nick Glasgow is one such inspiring story. Told by his doctors at Stanford that he had zero chance of finding a fully matched donor to cure his AML, his friends and family launched a passionate donor drive campaign online and off. Nick’s ethnicity is a quarter Japanese, and according to the Asian-American Donor Program only 7.2 percent are of Asian descent. Unbelievably, not one, but two perfect donors were found for Nick. His family credits Facebook and Twitter with driving the success of their efforts. Another inspiring story is of 27-year old AML patient Michelle, detailed at Project Michelle.

The issue is all in the numbers. A recent WSJ piece discussed how bone marrow registires are turning to Facebook and other social networks to help diversify the roster of potential donors, especially searching for donors of multiethnic backgrounds. Registries currently have limited representation of potential donors from multiethnic and minority backgrounds, including people with European Jewish heritage like Jonathan. Since a perfectly matched donor will most likely have the same or similar ethnicity as the patient, increasing the representation of potential donors from all backgrounds is vitally important.

So Team Haupt has turned to Facebook and Twitter to help get the word out about Jonathan’s urgent need. We are so thankful for the amazing support we’ve seen already. Plans for donor drives around the country in honor of Jonathan are in full swing, thanks to DKMS, and your help today in spreading the word through Facebook, word of mouth, and every other means in between will ensure that Jonathan’s donor story defies the odds just like Nick’s. Got Marrow? You bet.