A teenager who made an urgent appeal for bone marrow donations has died only days before she was due to have a transplant.

Dawn Muirhead, 18, from Leicester, who made the appeal on BBC's East Midlands Today four months ago, died from leukaemia which had spread throughout her body.

In June this year Dawn was told that without a bone marrow transplant she had just six months to live.

She made the television appeal in an attempt to have more donors come forward to help increase the changes of finding a match for leukaemia patients.

Hit-and-run

Although a match was found for her after hundreds of people came forward to have bone marrow tests, she was too ill to have the operation.

Her mother Lesley Shipley said: "Dawn was going to go in for a bone marrow transplant on 26 September and everything was arranged.

"But they found that the leukaemia had come back - it was 100% in her bone marrow."

Andrea Jacobs, her sister, said: "I want people to be aware that it is a life-saving operation and maybe if we had got this match sooner it would not have come to this."