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For 80,000 Americans on Medicine's Death Row Seeking Answers, Now the American Society of Transplant Surgeons Endorses Using the Internet

Delray Beach, FL (PRWEB) October 10, 2007 -- America's need for organs is growing five times faster than the rate of available donations. Desperate Americans are going online to find someone - anyone - who will keep them alive. People routinely wait up to seven years for an organ. Most of them will never get one. Nearly 7,000 of them die each year. Meanwhile they wait - like death row prisoners in their own home, bound to nearby hospitals, often bed-ridden, stuck in a dialysis unit every other day - for the rest of their lives.

Steve Spitzer spends idles away his time reading a book about dog training. He's been on the transplant list for 3 1/2 years for kidney disease. For more than a year and a half he's spent most of the day for two days each week sitting in a chair getting dialysis. Without dialysis, or a transplant, he won't survive.

"I am leading half a life now," says Phyllis McGill. She reads mysteries to her 88-year-old mother while they wait for a kidney. Three days a week she gets up at 4 am and spends the day taking her mother to dialysis. Mom has been on the national organ transplant list awaiting a kidney since 2001. The odds are not good - 92,000 people (2/3rds of them kidney patients) are waiting for organs from deceased donors. Less than 10,000 kidneys are available each year. Meanwhile, every 13 minutes a new name is added to the waiting list.

Ken Novikoff, 60, has lived with kidney disease for decades. Though he's stayed in remission all that time with the help of a strict vegetarian diet, but he always knew that some day the inevitable would happen. Now he, too, has become what he calls "a prisoner of dialysis." Desperate, like thousands of other patients, he's turned to the Internet looking for a donor. He's even had an organ donation information page added to his website, where he shares his love for the music and singers of the twenties (http://www.KenNovikoff.com).

As the competition for organs on the Internet heats up, so does the debate over the ethics of the online competition for organs. But this month The American Society of Transplant Surgeons has acknowledged that "there are ethical grounds to proceed with these types of transplants." The ASTS's initial opposition stemmed from concern that the Internet might undermine the fairness of UNOS's organ allocation system. Its new position recognizes that the Internet can make many more organs available. The ASTS's acceptance of the Internet now gives credibility to using the Internet for matching donors with patients. This is particularly true for people on dialysis - waiting on a virtual death row! When patients find living donors online, these are organs that otherwise would not be on UNOS's list. So whenever someone gets a directed donation through the Internet, people on the waiting list move up closer to the top.

The major factor limiting the number of organ donors is the low percentage of families who consent to donation. A 1995 study of families of donor-eligible patients found that 86.5% were asked to donate but only 47.3% gave consent. Only 40% of suitable individuals donate their solid organs after death. On the other hand, the demand for organs has been risen 400% in the past decade.

With dialysis, a life can be preserved for ten years or more. But for many kidney patients, that's worse than death because it means spending the rest of your life on "Death Row," two or three days every week dragging yourself to a dialysis appointment for hours each time. In fact, about one in five patients prefer to quit dialysis, rather than go through this - which of course is the ultimate death sentence. Between 1995 and 2002, according to government data, more than 60,000 people died like this rather than continue living on medicine's death row. And the rate of people on dialysis is increasing alarmingly, with 100,000 new patients each year.

There are three categories of living donations: (1) directed donation to a loved one or friend; (2) non-directed donation to the general pool (goes to the recipient on top of the waiting list); and (3) directed donation to a stranger, such as someone you met through the Internet. Finally, there is a fourth category, which is relatively new - donor exchanges. There are two types of exchanges. With Deceased Swap Donation (or a three-way kidney exchange) a non-matching relative or friend donates a kidney to the general waiting list then their relative or friend would have priority on the waiting list for the next available kidney. With the Living Donor Paired Exchange, a patient with a donor that isn't compatible exchanges with another patient with an incompatible organ, thus getting two compatible transplants.

Proponents of directed donations through the Internet express sympathy with the difficulty that patients and their families experience during the long, difficult and frustrating process of waiting for an organ. This is particularly true for patients on dialysis - waiting on a virtual death row!

In 2004 Paul Dooley from Canton, MA and Dr. Jeremiah Lowney co-founded MatchingDonors.com due to the huge shortage of available organs when Mr. Dooley's own father couldn't even get on the waiting list. They believe that there are thousands of altruistic and compassionate people willing to consider live organ donation if they were made more aware of the opportunity to help their fellow human beings. For information on how organ transplants can help people in need go to http://www.MatchingDonors.com For more information on kidney disease, go to http://www.kidney.org

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