Facebook did a great thing Tuesday, setting up an option to allow its 900 million members to add their organ donor status to their Timelines.
The choice is designed to create awareness about the extreme need for organ donations; adding your “donor” status isn’t legally binding — Facebook isn’t an organ donation registry — but the site will have links to your state registry. Giving your “donor” status can also serve as definitive decision tie-breaker if you were to die suddenly, and family members aren’t sure if the donor card in your wallet really represents your wishes.
Dr. Andrew M. Cameron, the surgical director of liver transplantation at Johns Hopkins Hospital, said the social networking site is a perfect starting point for people to have discussions with family and friends about organ donation. As opposed to trying to have the “conversation,” and make a decision at the motor vehicle department. Fewer than half of adult Americans have signed up to be an organ donor, the New York Times reported.
“We have attempted to have a sensitive conversation, one that addresses your mortality, at the D.M.V.,” Dr. Cameron said. “Now we move the conversation into your own home or office with 120 of your closest friends on Facebook.”
The Johns Hopkins experts report that with more than 114,000 people waiting for hearts, livers and kidneys and other organs in the United States, someone dies every four hours waiting for a transplant. In addition to those organs, the Pentagon is funding research on facial transplants, a growing need spurred by catastrophic facial injuries to soldiers.
In the U.S. right now, there are 114,000 people waiting for donor organs. Only 28,535 transplants were performed last year. About 7,000 people die every year waiting for transplants.
Facebook has already informally, but effectively, been used to drum up organ donations — by desperate users setting up pages seeking an organ. Last year, a Detroit man received a kidney after his wife set up a page with such a plea for a donor, and someone came through.
Facebook says the initiative was inspired by recent disasters such as last year’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, and the social network’s role in keeping people connected, according to news reports.
But the shortage of organ donors, living and dead, is its own crisis, one that transplant experts hope Facebook’s move will help ameliorate.
Surveys have shown that most Americans support organ donation, but only about 40 percent of the adult population register as organ donors, ABC News reported. Facebook can help people put some action behind the sentiment.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
