April is National Donate Life Month
Contact: Erin Morton, APR
Manager, Corporate Communications
emorton@rtix.com
(352) 281-7579
April is national Donate Life Month, a time designated to raising awareness about the critical need and importance of organ, tissue and eye donation and to highlight how donation saves and enhances lives. This is also a time to encourage everyone to designate their wish to be a donor with their state registry and to celebrate those affected by donation – the donors and their families who have given the gift of life and the tens of thousands of lives saved and enhanced through donation each year.
The pledge to be a donor means more than a promise to donate life-saving organs such as hearts, livers, lungs, intestines and kidneys. A donor is also eligible to give gifts of tissue—which include bone, skin, heart valves, connective tissue, veins and pericardium—used in more than one million surgeries routinely performed each year in the United States. Tissues donated for research are used by medical professionals to provide opportunities to learn and to further technology, so that more recipients may benefit in the future.
A recent study sponsored by Donate Life America found that 56 percent of Americans support organ and tissue donation, but only 47 percent of those individuals have taken the necessary steps to designate their wishes on their state’s donor registry. To find out how to join your state’s organ and tissue donor registry, visit www.donatelife.net/CommitToDonation
One organ and tissue donor can help more than 50 people. More than 110,000 men, women and children are currently in need of life-saving and life-enhancing transplants. Many more people are eligible to donate tissues than organs. Organ donation usually takes place when brain death has occurred, and transplants must be performed within a short time afterward. Tissue can be recovered within 12 to 24 hours of death and preserved for later use.
Heart valve donations replace defective valves and may improve patients’ heart function. Half of all heart valves are transplanted into children under the age of 15. Donated veins can help restore blood circulation, and skin donations may speed the healing process for burn victims, as well as assist in correction of urinary incontinence.
Donated bone can save an injured patient from amputation, and may aid in spinal, musculoskeletal, and fracture repair. Increasing numbers of surgeries use allograft bone dowels, wedges, pastes, and pins as the implants of choice for tissue repair. Tissue is favored over metals and synthetics—which sometimes weaken and stress adjoining bone—and the body usually adapts to the transplanted bone as if it were the patient’s own.
RTI Donor Services is a not-for-profit tissue recovery network dedicated to serving donor families and the donation community in perpetuating the circle of life. In addition to offering families the option of tissue donation, RTI Donor Services supports their wishes as a responsible steward of human donated tissue gifts, provides family services, and offers community information and awareness. RTI Donor Services may be accessed through the Internet at www.rtidonorservices.org
For more information on donation, please visit the Donate Life America website at www.donatelife.net.
###