Each year, 75,000 lives are at jeopardy in the United States. Only one in every four this year will be saved.
4,000 of these people will die this year alone.
1,200 will have no chance at being saved.
These people are all in need of kidney transplants.
Currently, there are 18,000 donors compared to an ever-growing list of people still waiting for transplants. The obvious problem: not enough donors.
Yet, there is a solution and the solution is literally out there still being debated upon while thousands die. The solution: government controlled compensation.
A short biology lesson: people only need one kidney to live a perfectly normal life. The reason so many people are without donors is that not every potential recipient is a suitable match for every potential donor. The only successfully match donors with recipients is having a larger pool of donors to choose from. To solve it is to adopt a practice. A not only realistic but necessary and perfectly ethical practice; compensation for a person's time and risk in the donation of their kidney.
Despite decades and decades of public education about the virtues of organ donation, the waiting list just gets longer, and the time to transplantation just gets longer. ... It's past time to face the fact that altruism is just not enough.
-Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who received a kidney from a friend in 2006
WARNING: HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC
Picture Courtesy Of:
http://michelsfeir.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/organ-donation-poster.png
Further Reading:
http://nonpresidentscholar.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/change-in-human-organ-transplant-act/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90632108
http://www.kidney.org.uk/Medical-Info/kidney-disease/small-singlekid.html
A delicate subject with the potential of generating strong emotional and visceral (no pun intended) responses. Because it's a public interest kind of topic, make sure that you make it relevant for our class -- what we know or not know about organ donation and how relevant it is to our lvies... we are young and may not need to pay heed to this topic until we reach old age or supper a disorder, so how do you make it relevant and raise our awareness NOW?
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