Official sets organ donation as priority

Roughly 95,000 Americans are waiting for life-saving organ transplants. But to save those lives, you must have organs to transplant, notes the acting U.S. surgeon general.

Rear Adm. Dr. Kenneth P. Moritsugu was in Salt Lake City on Tuesday as a guest of Intermountain Donor Services to talk to Utah and Idaho hospital executives and others about the importance of making organ donation a priority. He also congratulated them, since this region has one of the highest organ-donor rates in the country. Primary Children's Medical Center, for instance, has organ procurement rates close to 90 percent.

Awards were presented to Primary, LDS Hospital, University Hospital and the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center.

Organ donation is very personal to Moritsugu, whose wife died in a car crash in 1992. She became an organ donor. Four years later, his daughter, 22, died in a crash. Her organs were also donated.

"When you lose a loved one, anticipated or suddenly, it's a huge tragedy from a stress, physical and mental basis and from a spiritual basis as well," he said. "For me, (the decision to donate) was relatively easy because we had talked about it years before. I knew what they wanted. I was grief-stricken, but there is comfort knowing out of a bad thing something good results. They left a legacy of life here on earth.

"It provided a context for that loss. It was not only a tragedy but an opportunity."

In 2003, then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson targeted low organ-donor rates and long waiting lists as a priority. Several collaborative charters have since boosted the number of people who receive organs by increasing the number of people willing to donate after they die — or, in the case of a kidney or a section of liver, while they live.

But donations still don't come close to matching need. Two years ago, organs were donated by only 2,155 of an estimated 14,000 potential donors nationwide. An average of 17 people on waiting lists still die each day.

The most recent collaborative charter targets making sure that eligible donors and their families are given an opportunity to designate their wishes for organ and tissue donation and to see that in cases where consent is given, transplantation occurs, said Craig Myrick, organ recovery director for IDS.