Need for Organ Donors. Sign up on Facebook!

Facebook to Provide Organ Donation Registration

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook surprised users and the transplant community on May 1 by unveiling it will begin immediately asking users to upgrade its Timeline structure to check their organ donor status which will direct them to Donate Life America’s National Registration Page which will allow them to designate their decision to be an organ donor if they have not already done so.

Zuckerberg chose to make the stunning announcement in an exclusive interview with ABC News’ Robin Roberts on Good Morning America. “We think that people can really help spread awareness of organ donation and that they want to participate in this to their friends. And that can be a big part of helping to solve the crisis that’s out there,” Zuckerberg told Roberts. The process was launched simultaneously with Zuckerberg’s announcement allowing users in the US and the UK to add to their Facebook Timelines, that they are organ donors, and if the reader isn’t an organ donor, direct them to links that will take them to donor registries in their local area where they can enroll.

http://www.trannews.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/e2013-...

Less than 1% of people in the U.S. (about 15,000-20,000) die in circumstances favorable for organ donation.

Understanding Death Before Donation

To understand organ donation and the shortage of organs for transplants, one needs to have a basic understanding of how people die and what impact it has on whether they can, in fact, be donors or not. Of the 2.2 million people who die in America each year, relatively few die under circumstances that make them medically eligible to be either organ donors or tissue donors.  

Brain Death and Organ Donation

Most deceased organ donors are brain dead. They have suffered complete and irreversible loss of all brain function and are clinically and legally dead. Mechanical ventilation and medications keeps their heart beating and blood flowing to their organs.

In the U.S., less than one percent – about 15,000-20,000 – of all deaths are brain deaths. These are usually patients who suffer an injury to the brain resulting from a trauma, stroke or lack of oxygen and are rushed to the hospital, where doctors aggressively work to save their lives but cannot.

Brain Dead is Dead. There is No “Recovery”

Brain death can be confusing, particularly for families who are confronted with the sudden death of someone they love because a brain dead person on a ventilator can feel warm to the touch and can look "alive." The heart is still beating and the ventilator is pushing oxygen and air into the lungs making the person's chest rise and fall.

Brain death can be confusing for families who are confronted with the sudden death of someone they love.

When this happens, some families expect that the person they love can simply be kept on the ventilator in hopes that their condition will improve. But to be brain dead is to be dead, and no improvement or recovery is possible. Defibrillators used to "shock" a heart may get it functioning again within the first several minutes after it stops. But there is no such method to jump-start or revive a brain that has been deprived of blood and whose cells have died.