Sanjivan - The Organ Donation Blog

When I first wrote about Steve Jobs and his cancer, I never thought that he would become such an advocate of organ donation.

But today, he went up on to the stage and he spoke in length about how organ donation can really change the world. Steve Jobs is such an amazing evangelist and I am happy that organ donation campaign has got such a wonderful campaigner.

Bless everyone and hope there is a day when people don’t have to wait for years to get an organ donation.

There is a tremendous need for liver transplants that isn’t being met through cadaveric donation. UNOS figures show more than 16,000 people await liver transplants, yet only about 5,000 transplants actually occur. There is an enormous gap.

Enter living donation. The special characteristics of the human liver make living donation unique. While each of us has only one liver, it is a large, segmented organ that regenerates, allowing a surgeon to remove a portion yet have both the recipient and donor with complete livers within a matter of a few months.

Living donation has important advantages over cadaveric donation:

• The waiting time for a transplant recipient can be significantly reduced.
• The procedure can be scheduled at a time convenient for both the donor and recipient.
• The quality of the donated organ tends to be superior to cadaveric organs.
• The time between procurement of the organ and transplantation to the recipient is minimized

Thanks to livingdonorsonline.org for this information.

Living Donors make up almost 50% of all the donations in the U.S. Even though the term - “living donors” sounds simple, I would like to go little more in detail about what it means and how it means to you.

You and I can donate some of our organs and still remain healthy and live a long life. Not only we live healthy and long, we also help another person live long by donating our organ/tissue.

The following organs can be donated by living donors - kidney, liver, lung, intestine, pancreas.

I will go more in to details in the following days to come. If you have any questions meanwhile, please don’t hesitate to write a comment and I will surely respond to them.

The following organs can be donated.

• Heart
• Kidneys
• Liver
• Lungs
• Pancreas
• Small Intestine