Twitter saves lives amid travel chaos – helps stranded medical courier

Twitter has helped a charity transporting life saving bone marrow for a transplant, get past the travel chaos caused by the Icelandic volcano.

The ash cloud has grounded most flights across Europe and the Anthony Nolan Trust, a leukaemia charity, found that their courier carrying vital stem cells, which can degrade within 72 hours, was stranded in Germany.

At 4pm the Trust tweeted that “URGENT! Our courier stuck in Brussels carrying marrow. Needs 2 get on Eurostar/tunnel from 8pm UK time 2nyt. Can u help?”

In less than an hour and after thousands of re-tweets, they posted “A HUGE thank you to Eurostar who have seen all of our tweets and have guaranteed us that our courier has a seat on the train tonight. Yay!!”

Dan Ware, Digital Marketing Manager at the Trust explains the story; “Michael [the courier] in Germany was bringing back stem cells back to the UK, but was obviously stuck by the chaos caused by the ash cloud.”

“So we put out an emergency call to action to get all our followers to see if we could get him a seat on the train, because if he didn’t get back in time the stem cells might perish – within five minutes we were inundated,” exclaims Dan. “We were a trending topic on twitter for about 20 minutes, and Eurostar guaranteed us a seat.”

The Trust’s chief executive Henny Braund had warned in a press release on Monday, about the danger of couriers getting stranded after another courier only just got through.

“Once the stem cells have been taken from the donor, there is a window of only about 72 hours for the transplant to take place before the cells die, so time is really critical.

“In addition, patients who are about to have their transplant are in an extremely vulnerable state as their immune system is effectively stripped away before they receive the new stem cells. They will be kept in isolation but this is obviously an extremely worrying time for all involved.”

The Trust is continuing updates of Michael the courier’s progress @anthonynolan.