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Anthony Tesoriero
  • Business Economics
  • Class of 2016
  • East Rockaway, NY

Anthony Tesoriero Helps Organize Gift of Life Bone Marrow Registration Drive

2016 Nov 14

Anthony Tesoriero of East Rockaway, NY, volunteered at SUNY Oneonta's third annual Gift of Life Bone Marrow Donor Registration Drive on Oct. 26 and 27.

A total of 190 people signed up to become potential bone marrow and stem cell donors through Gift of Life, a national, public, not-for-profit registry facilitating life-saving transplants for patients with blood cancers such as leukemia and lymphoma.

Tesoriero volunteered at the event as a member of SUNY Oneonta's Epsilon Nu Chapter of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity, which co-sponsored the registration drive with the Gift of Life organization.

The registration process is simple and quick. At a drive, potential donors register with Gift of Life online using their phones. After answering health questions to see if they will be viable to donate bone marrow, they use cotton swabs provided in a testing kit to collect saliva samples from four different areas of the mouth. The cotton swabs are placed back into the kit, which is labeled with the donor's registration ID and shipped out to be added to the database of potential donors.

Gift of Life Community Engagement Coordinator and Zeta Beta Tau member Russell Lowe, a 2016 SUNY Oneonta graduate, organized the college's first Gift of Life drive--which was also the first in Central New York--in 2014 as a fraternity service project. He interned with Gift of Life the following year and landed a job with the organization upon graduation in May 2016. Over the past three years, nearly 1,400 people have joined the Gift of Life registry through the SUNY Oneonta drives, and three donors have been matched with patients.

"The success of these drives really does show the generosity and caring nature of the students at our school," Lowe said.

When a match is found, the donor is contacted and given the opportunity to donate bone marrow or blood cell stems. Lowe said the first two matches were found a year apart and both were for patients suffering from rare forms of leukemia. Both decided to go through with the donations, but in one case, the patient wasn't healthy enough to receive the donation. The second match is currently going through the donation process, and a third match was just found as a result of this year's drive.

The Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation was founded in 1991 with the goal of finding bone marrow matches for people suffering from life-threatening illnesses, including leukemia, lymphoma and other cancers and genetic diseases. Since then, Gift of Life has registered more than 257,000 volunteer donors and helped facilitate more than 3,000 bone marrow transplants for patients in need.