Organ Donation

Facebook is the biggest online social medium in the world. People love it, are uneasy with it, even a little suspicious. It just may have done something inarguably good, with immediate, measurable impact. So far, that seems to be the case with Facebook's new organ-donation push. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that users can now choose to indicate to their Facebook world that they wish to be organ donors. And, if you choose, a link can whisk you right to your state's donor registry, where you can register online.

Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old Newtown Square girl dying of cystic fibrosis, survived six hours of surgery Wednesday to receive lungs from an adult donor - a transplant made possible by her family's fight to change lung-allocation rules. "We are thrilled to share that Sarah is out of surgery," her mother, Janet Ruddock Murnaghan, posted on Facebook. "Her doctors are very pleased with both her progress during the procedure and her prognosis for recovery. " Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where Sarah has been in intensive care for weeks, told the family at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday viable adult lungs were available, according to Sarah's aunt, Sharon Ruddock.

Godspeed to Sarah Murnaghan and Javier Acosta, both of whom are at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia suffering from the debilitating effects of cystic fibrosis. U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson granted them relief recently by allowing each to join the waiting list for an adult lung. This prompted the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to create a special appeal and review system to hear cases such as theirs in which children need access to adult organs. While Javier is still waiting, Sarah received a transplanted lung from an adult donor just days ago. But if we really want to swell the number of available hearts, lungs, livers, and corneas, there is a more obvious and expansive solution.

RELATIVES OF A 10-year-old girl, who they say has been denied a life-saving lung transplant because of her age, are appealing to the public in hopes of finding a donor to save their child. "There's unfortunately no options left," said Sharon Ruddock, the aunt of Sarah Murnaghan, who has end-stage cystic fibrosis and has been unable to leave Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for three months, needing a ventilator to breathe. The child is a top candidate for an organ from a pediatric donor but few are available, and family members say that under existing policy, a lung from an adult donor would be offered first to all adults in the region, even those more stable and with less severe conditions.

RICK SELVIN, the ex-Daily News staffer who died recently, was very lucky to get a heart transplant and 10 more years of life. More than half of the 98,000 Americans on the national waiting list will die before they get a transplant, most needlessly. Americans bury or cremate about 20,000 transplantable organs every year. More than 6,000 of their neighbors die every year as a result. There is a simple way to put a big dent in the organ shortage - give organs first to people who have agreed to donate their organs when they die. Giving organs first to organ donors will persuade more people to register as organ donors.

Robert J. Rehrmann is such a believer in organ donation that he ran a full-page ad in Tuesday's Inquirer urging people to follow his example and register as a donor. "Think of the incredible relief of human suffering you will have helped bring about," the 84-year-old retired aeronautical engineer wrote in the $3,700 advertisement, published in Pennsylvania editions. Alas, his altruistic promotion contained some misinformation about how to register. And it turns out that he actually signed up to give his body for medical education, not organ donation.

This is National Organ and Tissue Donor Awareness Week. It's easy, though, to get through the week and still avoid thinking about whether you'd want your family to donate your organs to someone else after you're dead. The issue is distasteful. Any scenario in which you get to donate organs involves either your being dead or someone you love being dead. But every day, people bury livers, kidneys, hearts and lungs in the ground, where they'll rot and decay, instead of giving the gift of life to others like themselves and their loved ones - mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, husbands, wives, children, grandparents - all longing to return to rich, active lives.

Last month, the American Medical Association entertained changes to the way we understand organ donation. Whereas organ donation has always been viewed as a gift, the AMA suggested that we investigate offering financial incentives to encourage organ donation. The proposal was inspired in part by a questionable statistic: that only about a third of all eligible donors agree to donate their organs. In fact, donation rates are most reliably assessed at a regional level, and in some regions considerable majorities consent to donation.

On her dead son's birthday and at Christmastime, Judy Carr inquires about his organs, to see how they are doing in their new lives. When she learned a few weeks ago that one of his kidneys had failed, she grieved anew for her Tim, lost in a car wreck at age 18. Yet Carr, of Mary Esther, Fla., has found in organ donation a source of redemptive power. And so it has been for Pat Bell of Tampa. She believes her Jonathan has continued to help people since a gunshot claimed him. "His heart valves, his strong, young, healthy, 17-year-old male bones.

A week ago, Barbara March climbed into a crib at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and curled against her 2-year-old son, Matthew, for one last hug. For 45 days, Matthew had been waiting for a double-lung transplant. The lungs did not come in time and he had slipped into a coma. Instead, he would become a donor. After that final hug, Barbara March, a 32-year-old Coatesville teacher, and her husband, Benjamin, a 44-year-old businessman, let a surgeon take Matthew's kidneys for another deathly ill child.

Godspeed to Sarah Murnaghan and Javier Acosta, both of whom are at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia suffering from the debilitating effects of cystic fibrosis. U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson granted them relief recently by allowing each to join the waiting list for an adult lung. This prompted the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to create a special appeal and review system to hear cases such as theirs in which children need access to adult organs. While Javier is still waiting, Sarah received a transplanted lung from an adult donor just days ago. But if we really want to swell the number of available hearts, lungs, livers, and corneas, there is a more obvious and expansive solution.

Sarah Murnaghan, the 10-year-old Newtown Square girl dying of cystic fibrosis, survived six hours of surgery Wednesday to receive lungs from an adult donor - a transplant made possible by her family's fight to change lung-allocation rules. "We are thrilled to share that Sarah is out of surgery," her mother, Janet Ruddock Murnaghan, posted on Facebook. "Her doctors are very pleased with both her progress during the procedure and her prognosis for recovery. " Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where Sarah has been in intensive care for weeks, told the family at 10:30 p.m. Tuesday viable adult lungs were available, according to Sarah's aunt, Sharon Ruddock.

The parents of a 10-year-old Newtown Square girl who is in dire need of a lung transplant have made a public appeal for a lung donation from any family that loses a loved one. Janet and Fran Murnaghan said such a directed organ donation is the "only hope" for daughter Sarah, who has cystic fibrosis and has been on the lung transplant waiting list for 18 months. She has been in Children's Hospital of Philadelphia since February, where she is on a pressurized oxygen machine. Her case illustrates how relatively few pediatric lungs become available for transplant while adult lungs - which could be cut down to fit her - must first be offered to all wait-listed adults in the region.

RELATIVES OF A 10-year-old girl, who they say has been denied a life-saving lung transplant because of her age, are appealing to the public in hopes of finding a donor to save their child. "There's unfortunately no options left," said Sharon Ruddock, the aunt of Sarah Murnaghan, who has end-stage cystic fibrosis and has been unable to leave Children's Hospital of Philadelphia for three months, needing a ventilator to breathe. The child is a top candidate for an organ from a pediatric donor but few are available, and family members say that under existing policy, a lung from an adult donor would be offered first to all adults in the region, even those more stable and with less severe conditions.

Following what she called "intense interest" in the case of a 10-year-old girl who is waiting for a lung transplant at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, asked Friday for a review of the nation's lung allocation policy. She also is seeking "new approaches for promoting pediatric and adolescent organ donation. " HHS oversees the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which sets organ allocation rules.

Following a concerted effort by New Jersey's Motor Vehicle Commission to ask every customer about organ donation, the number of registered donors in the state shot up last year. The number of people who registered as donors at MVC offices rose from 626,857 in 2011 to 713,702 in 2012, up 14 percent. In total, the number of registered donors in New Jersey went up by 4.5 percent during that time period to 2.4 million. The numbers were highlighted Thursday at a news conference at Our Lady of Lourdes Medical Center in Camden, which performs organ transplants.

Facebook is the biggest online social medium in the world. People love it, are uneasy with it, even a little suspicious. It just may have done something inarguably good, with immediate, measurable impact. So far, that seems to be the case with Facebook's new organ-donation push. On Tuesday, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that users can now choose to indicate to their Facebook world that they wish to be organ donors. And, if you choose, a link can whisk you right to your state's donor registry, where you can register online.

In our region, 6,500 critically ill residents wait for organs, kidneys, livers, hearts. After a notable 8.6 percent decline last year, local organ donations have increased - March was a banner month - but not enough if you ask anyone who has been waiting and waiting, an average of five years for a healthy kidney. In 1994, Pennsylvania became one of the first states to list organ donation on driver's licenses. The region is a mecca with eight surgical centers performing transplants.

Through the 1990s and into the 2000s, as public awareness about the need for organ transplants grew, the number of people who became donors - living and deceased - increased by several hundred each year. In the last four years, however, that number has leveled off. Last year, total donors were down slightly nationwide. Locally, there was a bigger drop. Pennsylvania saw a 6.6 percent decline in the number of people who were organ donors last year, while New Jersey's number fell 7.9 percent, according to data collected by the United Network for Organ Sharing, a federal contractor that manages the U.S. transplant system.

Robert J. Rehrmann is such a believer in organ donation that he ran a full-page ad in Tuesday's Inquirer urging people to follow his example and register as a donor. "Think of the incredible relief of human suffering you will have helped bring about," the 84-year-old retired aeronautical engineer wrote in the $3,700 advertisement, published in Pennsylvania editions. Alas, his altruistic promotion contained some misinformation about how to register. And it turns out that he actually signed up to give his body for medical education, not organ donation.