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From: Yorkshire Post - Friday 24/5/2002
Date: 5/25/02
Time: 8:41:14 AM
Remote Name: 212.50.175.18
Alexandra Buller
It's tea at Number 10 for the bone marrow campaign girls
TWO special youngsters from Yorkshire have been invited for tea with the Prime Minister and his wife in Downing Street.
Alice Maddocks and Molly-Ann Barnett received a formal invitation from Tony and Cherie Blair to have tea with them on July 11 in recognition of their parents' successful campaign to reform the system of bone marrow recruitment.
Last July Carol and Dean Maddocks made an appeal to Mr Blair to boost the number of bone marrow donors to 40,000, nearly three times the figure at the time.
After listening to their pleas for help the Prime Minister committed nearly £6m for this, and a national promotion campaign that began earlier this year.
The meeting followed years of campaigning by the parents after their daughters were diagnosed with severe blood disorders that required bone marrow transplants.
Last year Molly-Ann, seven, of Hessle, near Hull, beat odds of 90,000 to one against finding a suitable donor to cure her leukaemia. She was given a transplant and the operation has been a complete success.
Doctors have been unable so far to find a suitable match for Alice, nine, who has aplastic anaemia, but her family is still optimistic that they will find a matching donor.
The invitation to Number 10 comes after Mrs Maddocks, of Hanging Heaton, Dewsbury, wrote to Mr Blair informing him of the progress the National Blood Service has made in achieving its objectives.
She said last night: "I wrote to him in March after we'd been to see Yvette Cooper MP (a health minister) bringing him up to date with what is happening with the National Blood Service, and also that Molly had got into a high achieving school on her own merits.
"At the end I said it might be nice one day for these two young ladies to meet hin.