Facebook to Save Lives

By Iris Santana and Brandon Bowers –

Globally, there are about 900 million Facebook users.

Worldwide, there are about 150,000 people waiting for an organ transplant.

Thousands of the 150,000 people die each year, due to the lack of donors. Now only if there was a way to get more people to be willing to donate their organs…

Well, Facebook has an idea. They plan to create a unique section called ‘Health and Wellness’ that will be attached with other biographical information where you will be able to share with the Facebook world that you’re an organ donor.

Penn Manor senior Matt Duvall is an organ donor.

“I think that this is a good idea for Facebook to have a direct link just for organ donors because if not many people want to donate then that’s their choice. But it will also help save lives and let people live a long life,” said Duvall.

According to an article in the New York Times, ‘The company announced  a plan on Facebook to start advertising their donor statuses on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools- a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.’

“This is going to be an historic day in transplant, This math will radically change and we may well eliminate the problem,” Dr. Andrew M. Cameron said in the interview with Times.

This application will have links to state online donor registries where users can become a donor.

“I went on the Facebook page where the donor information sheet was and it was so intense. They were asking everything like, if I ever broke a bone, if I ever overcame a habit, stuff like that. It was crazy just for a simple thing,” Duvall added.

A day after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement last week, 3,900 users signed up to become a donor, just in California alone. It also showed that each day, 70 more people registered online.

“That’s why this could do a whole lot of people a lot of good,” said Anne Paschke, the spokeswoman for UNOS, a nonprofit that manages the U.S. transplant system under a government contract, in an interview with philly.com.

Will Welsh a Penn Manor senior thinks otherwise.

“I’m not against the whole donating your organ thing because my mom is an organ donor and I respect that, but I just don’t want people digging in my body after I die to have my organs. I think that is nasty to put me inside someone else that needs it,” Welsh said.

“And also I saw the Facebook information sheet about it and its complicated. They ask for a lot. Even if I was a organ donor I wouldn’t waste my time filling it out,”  said Welsh. ” Yes I know they only take them once your dead, but its just weird to me.”

Facebook’s new organ donor program may be a great way to help save lives. They will be able to get the help they need and have it done efficiently.