Parents Seek Organ Donors Using Social Networking
The parents of a terminally-ill baby girl in the United Kingdom are using a popular social networking site to search for possible organ donors.
Bethany Dawson, who is a little over one year old, was born with a medical condition known as gastroschisis which required her to undergo 15 surgeries before her first birthday. Her doctors put her on the liver and intestine transplant list in March 2008, but a suitable donor has yet to be found.
Dr Girish Gupte, the consultant at Birmingham Children’s Hospital in charge of her case, reports that Bethany’s case is complicated by the fact that she needs a complete liver and intestine transplant from a donor weighing less than 66 pounds or 30 kilos – the approximate weight of a child 10 years old or younger.
When doctors told the couple their daughter couldn’t survive to her second birthday without an organ donation, they decided to set up a web page on Facebook telling her story and urging people to join the organ donation program.
Worldwide networking platforms, like the one used by Bethany’s parents on Facebook, and other social media tools like MySpace and YouTube, are not only helping patients and caregivers get in touch with others in similar situations, they’re helping raise international awareness about organ donation, cancer prevention, and other important health issues.
ABC reports nearly 30,000 people logged on to Bethany’s Facebook page during the past week. Much of the site traffic is from the United States which currently has more than 99,000 patients (including cancer survivors) on the transplant waiting list. When asked about the Facebook initiative, Bethany’s physician said,
“As a doctor, any family that is encouraging organ donation is good news for the transplant team simply because of the shortage of organ donors in the UK.”
Dr Girish Gupte
NHS Birmingham Children’s Hospital (UK)
To learn more about the organ donation program in Britain, visit http://www.uktransplant.org.uk/ukt/. For information about programs in the US, go to http://www.organdonor.gov/.
Source: abc NEWS
Related Links: United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS); Donate Life America; Minority Organ Tissue Transplant Education Program (MOTTEP)
Technorati Tags: birth defects; pediatric medicine
Print This
|
| Sphere: Related Content
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Browse All Categories: Next article: Berkeley Microarray Makes Cancer Diagnosis Less Costly
Previous article: Cuba Approves CimaVax EGF Vaccine for Lung Cancer
