Save A Life Today; Surprising Facts About Organ Donation

Fast Facts About Organ Donation & Transplantation

According to the U.S. Government Information on Organ Donation and Transplantation, in the United States alone there are over one hundred sixteen thousand men, women, and children currently on the national waiting list. Within that list, 33,611 transplants were performed in 2016 and approximately twenty patients per day die as a result of waiting for an organ transplant. The extraordinary news is one donor can save up to eight lives, as each donor can provide a heart, a pair of lungs and kidneys, a liver, pancreas, intestines, a set of eyes and numerous tissues that could be used for reconstruction surgery or other purposes.

Organ Donation Fast Facts Continued

Statistics for the national waiting list alone indicates that almost two-thirds of patients waiting for a transplant are over the age of fifty, almost two-thousand patients are children (under eighteen), and approximately seventy thousand or fifty-eight percent on the list are ethnic minorities comprised of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and others. The most common organ patients are anxiously waiting for is a kidney - at eighty-three percent as of 2017 - with 19,062 kidney transplants performed in 2016 alone. Transplantation statistics show eighty patients will receive a transplant a day in the U.S. The majority of these recipients being Caucasian (at fifty-six percent) with sixty-two percent being male, and thirty-eight percent being female. Donation statistics reveal 41,355 donations were made as of 2016, and ⅘ of these donors were deceased white males over the age of fifty.