News Release
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, Feb. 13, 2004 |
Contact: HHS Press Office
(202) 690-6343
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Statement by Tommy G. Thompson
Secretary of Health and Human Services
On National Donor Day, February 14, 2004
Tomorrow is National Donor Day, an opportunity for all Americans to seriously consider the potential to help others by giving the gift of life. I've long been passionate about the need for more Americans to register as organ donors and to let their families know about their wishes.
Just months after I become Secretary here at the Department of Health and Human Services, we launched the Gift of Life Donation Initiative, a five-pronged national effort to increase awareness and promote donation of organs, tissue, bone marrow and blood. Now, we're starting to see some positive results in terms of increased donations.
While final statistics won't be ready for a little while, the early signs suggest that 2003 will bring us the biggest rise in donation since hospitals began reporting such statistics in 1998. From January to November 2003, organ donation national has been up about 4.8 percent from the same period in 2002.
Among Hispanic and African-American donors, the early signs are even better -- with donations up 14 percent and 12 percent respectively in the first 11 months of 2003. That's great news, because, on average, minorities have waited nearly twice as long as Caucasians for organ transplants. There simply have not been enough minorities donating their organs. Finding a matching donor is much easier when people share a similar heritage or ethnicity.
But we still have a long way to go and I'm asking for your help. More than 83,000 Americans are still waiting for an organ to give them another chance at life. We can all do our part by making the decision to register as organ donors and sharing our decision with our family members so they can respect our wishes when the time comes.
Please help us give our fellow Americans more hope. Become an organ and tissue donor, and you may one day give the gift of life to someone desperately in need.
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Last Revised: February 13, 2004
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