If a cast member from Jersey Shore advised you to “get swabbed,” you might wonder what you did last night. But when it’s Andrew Jenks, the star of the walk-a-mile-in-another-man’s-shoes documentary show World of Jenks on MTV, you can assume it has something to do with doing good.
Turns out, Jenks, 24, is the newest evangelist for bone marrow donation. He’s teaming up with DKMS, the world’s largest bone marrow donor center, and DoSomething.org to spread the word on college campuses all spring. He’ll include a call to action in his broader talks about his life.
With the tagline “Get Swabbed,” the campaign is taking the mystery out of bone marrow screening. Just stick a Q-tip in your mouth, rub it around on the inside of your cheek, pull it out, get it screened and see if you’re a match for the thousands of patients searching the DKMS registry each day looking for a match. Donors are badly needed; very few patients find a match within their families and the majority of patients never find a match.
“You can save someone’s life within a minute,” Jenks told Tonic, explaining that before he joined the campaign he was ignorant about the need for bone marrow donors.
Now he knows how critical they are. “Every five minutes someone is diagnosed with blood cancer and every 10 minutes, someone dies from it,” he says.
College students are a particularly important audience, since they tend to be in good health and people between the ages of 18-25 have the most vital cells.
Who better to talk to them than Jenks? He’s one celebrity who recognizes the impact he can have. ”When you have a microphone and people are listening you might as well do something,” he says. At many of his speeches, DKMS representatives will be on hand to swab students.
Season two of World of Jenks is still casting, so the best place to see Jenks is at your nearest university. He’ll start his tour at the College of New Jersey on Jan. 20 and wrap it up on April 25 at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. Find the full schedule here.
Recently, Jenks filmed a public service announcement about the Get Swabbed campaign with a rambunctious five-year-old leukemia patient named Luis Danvers. Watch the new PSA below to find out how you can do something.
Photo 1 via Facebook, photo 2 courtesy of DKMS.