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Body Parts for Everyone!
By One Eyed View | July 18, 2007
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One Eyed View is proud to participate in the first world wide blogger social campaign to raise awareness about organ donation and the issues surrounding organ donation. I’m sure we all know what organ donation is…
An organ transplant is the moving of a whole or partial organ from one body to another for the purpose of replacing the recipient’s damaged or failing organ with a working one from the donor site. Organ donors can be living, or deceased (previously referred to as cadaveric). Organ transplants can be categorized as “life-saving”, while tissue transplants are “life-enhancing”.
I am a registered donor for several reasons and one of those reasons are directly related to the title of this blog…;) There are several reasons to become a donor…
Living related donors
Living related donors donate to family members or friends in whom they have an emotional investment. The risk of surgery is offset by the psychological benefit of not losing someone related to them, or not seeing them suffer the ill effects of waiting on a list.
Paired-exchange
A “paired-exchange” is a technique of matching willing living donors to compatible recipients. For example a spouse may be more than willing to donate a kidney to their partner but cannot since there is not a biological match. Willing spouse’s kidney is donated to a matching recipient who also has an incompatible but willing spouse. The second donor must match the first recipient to complete the pair exchange. Typically the surgeries are scheduled simultaneously in case one of the donors decides to back out and the couples are kept anonymous from each other until after the transplant.
Good Samaritan
“Good Samaritan” or “altruistic” donation is giving a donation to someone not well-known to the donor. Some people choose to do this out of a need to donate. Some donate to the next person on the list; others use some method of choosing a recipient based on criteria important to them. Web sites are being developed that facilitate such donation. It has been featured in recent television journalism that over half of the members of the Jesus Christians, an Australian religious group, have donated kidneys in such a fashion.
Compensated donation
In compensated donation, donors get money or other compensation in exchange for their organs.
In the United States, The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 made organ sales illegal; regulation by the OPTN has probably eliminated organ sales. In the United Kingdom, the Human Tissue Act 1961 made organ sales illegal.
Recent development of web sites and personal advertisements for organs among listed candidates has raised the possibility of selling organs once again, as well as sparking significant ethical debates over directed donation, “good-Samaritan” donation, and the current U.S. organ allocation policy.
If you would like to learn more about organ donation, here are some helpful links.
United Network for Organ Sharing
Organ Donor.gov
Transplant Living.org
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Topics: Community, Future, Health, Social Responsibility |
July 18th, 2007 at 10:12 am
I read yesterday that the number of people signing up to be organ donors in Holland has quadrupled since the hoax “Big Donor Show” was aired: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6902296.stm