Chinese couple give birth to three more sons to find lifesaving transplant match for sick first-born daughter
Doctors in Shenzhen say 210,000 yuan blood cord surgery was a success, but young girl, Zhuang Qian Qian, needs to take further 10 courses of antiviral drugs
A Chinese couple have given birth to three sons in the past four years to find a match for a lifesaving blood transplant for their daughter, mainland media reports.
The third son born to the couple in Shenzhen has finally proved to be the one and the successful surgery has now taken place, the news portal Gd.qq.com reported.
Their daughter, Zhuang Qian Qian, who had been living on blood transfusion, received a cord blood transplant – a sample of blood that is free of the disease, taken from her newborn brother’s umbilical cord – at Shenzhen Children’s Hospital in June, the website reported.
The couple say they spent 210,000 yuan (HK$232,000) on the transplant for their daughter, who was born in 2009 with thalassaemia, a rare blood disease that doctors said could be cured only by a bone marrow or cord blood transplant.
Although doctors say the transplant has been a success, the girl will need to continue to take 10 courses of antiviral medication, which each cost 10,000 yuan.
The girl’s father, Zhuang Weixiang, 34, who used to work in a factory in Shenzhen, said other family members had tried to persuade him to stop spending money on his daughter’s treatment.
“I couldn’t do that,” he said. “She is my first child. As long as I’m alive, I will not give her up.”
They have been borrowing thousands of yuan to pay for the medical bill.
Thalassaemia, also known as Mediterranean anaemia, is a group of inherited blood disorders that affects mainly people of Mediterranean, South Asian, southeast Asian and Middle Eastern origin.
About 300,000 people in China suffer from the disease, most of them in the southern part of the country, according to an official report published in May.
Health authorities estimate that 5,700 children are born every year with a severe form of thalassaemia in Guangdong province, which costs families 600 million yuan a year in treatment.
China’s decades-old one-child policy officially ended on January 1, 2016, but in certain circumstances families with sick first-born children were previously permitted to have more than one child.
