New Health Campaigns Promote Organ Donations
JOIE CHEN, CNN ANCHOR: Thompson says initial steps include a campaign to encourage employers, unions, and other employee organizations to promote donation through their ranks. Joining us to talk about all this from our medical unit is CNN's Christy Feig. Christy, I have to tell you that as we talked to the Web chatters throughout the day, they are very concerned about organ donation and how it happens. We saw a lot of questions from them. One of them from our online editorial chat this morning asked this question: "What types of people can't be organ donors?"</s>CHRISTY FEIG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the vast majority of people can be organ donors. The organizations that monitors people who can sign up and be organ donors says that everybody should sign up. It's the doctors that take the organs who will decide who can and cannot give. Because if you have Hepatitis, for example, maybe your liver wouldn't be able to be donated, but maybe, you know, your bone marrow or your</s>CHEN: And Christy, that question was from Michelle Mickelson; we didn't see all of her name there on the screen. Just wanted to give her credit for that. We have another question from our live chat under way now from Faith: "What organs are most needed?"</s>FEIG: Oh, hands down, that will be kidneys. There's about 76,000 people currently waiting for an organ in the United States right now. The vast majority of those are waiting for kidneys. The interesting thing about that is, we talked to somebody who, when she was 21 years old, about a year and a half ago, she went into kidney failure from the auto immune disease that she had. And they told her, you do need a kidney; you'll have to wait three to five years for a kidney. That's when she was 21 years old. She is still waiting at this point. The thing about kidneys, though, they can be taken from living donors. Everybody has two kidneys; you can live with just one. So that is one of the things that you can donate as a living donor, but kidneys are definitely one of the most needed organs out there.</s>CHEN: We have another question from our live chat under way: "Organ transplantation issues should include a debate about cost effectiveness." This is an awfully hard issue to talk about, when you're talking about life and death, Christy.</s>FEIG: It certainly is. One of the things are, you have got people who are sick, they certainly are going to rise up to the top of the list. One of the things that the experts must balance is, when is the time that people are too sick to survive the surgery? That's a fine line people have to walk there. And medical experts have to weigh is, when is somebody too sick to survive a surgery? And as far as the cost of donating an organ, the person that donates isn't responsible; it's the recipient and their health insurance that usually pay for that, but cost effectiveness is a thing; there comes a time when people may not survive the surgery.</s>CHEN: From our CNN medical unit with us today, Christy Feig. Thanks for being with us today, Christy.