With the arrival of Halloween comes all the blood and horror. While we all love to get ghoulish this time of year, the scary reality for many is that blood cancer or leukemia is a living nightmare for approximately  40,000 people each year. There is nothing more terrifying than trying to save someone you love who has been diagnosed with blood cancer.

In 1990 when Katherina Harf’s mother was diagnosed with blood cancer there were only 3,000 people world-wide registered for bone marrow transplants. Katrina’s father, Peter Harf worked tirelessly to save his wife and had 68,000 people register in one year alone. After losing her mom at 14, Katherina and her father decided to start DKMS.

The DKMS mission is to save lives by recruiting bone marrow donors for leukemia patients.

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DKMS is the largest bone marrow donor center in the world. DKMS donors have provided marrow and stem cells (PBSC) for more than 27,000 transplants and now has over 2.9 million registered bone marrow donors.

Katherina was recently asked the most important thing she has learned in her journey to help others and her answer was, “Passion can move mountains and human kindness has no limits.” Now that is taking something scary and making it something beautiful.

Charity Matters.

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