Organ donors are dropping.
The number of people in the UK donating organs after death has fallen for the first time in more than a decade, figures show.
Last year the number fell by 3% compared with the previous 12 months to 1,282.
NHS Blood and Transplant said fewer people were suitable for donating organs and there had been a fall in families giving consent.
Contrary to my feelings a decade or so ago, my reaction is “meh”. Perhaps, others, like me, are in nagging fatigue. We have been harangued and pestered so much – along with the threat of presumed consent – that people are finally deciding that enough is enough. Donation is a gift and should be treated as such. It is not a panacea. It is not an entitlement and there are fairly limited circumstances where it will be suitable anyway.
Yet now the NHS is reporting a 5% drop in the number of live donors – which include people donating a spare kidney or part of their liver – and the first drop in donations after death for 11 years.
The only time I would consider live donation would be for a close family member. Again, I suspect that after the rush of folk getting themselves in the news for giving bits of their body away, the majority recognise that, actually, we might just need those kidneys ourselves and that giving them away is a serious business. So, yeah, the nearest and dearest, but otherwise, my bits stay inside my skin. I’m using them. If you ask nicely, you may have them when I am no longer using them. The ask nicely being the relevant point here. But I am not going on your register.
Wales is due to become the first part of the UK to change their rules to a system where everyone is presumed to have given their consent for their organs to be donated.
People will have to opt out from December 2015.
The British Heart Foundation said the rest of the UK needed to follow suit in order to tackle the number of people waiting for a heart transplant, which has doubled in the past five years.
The charity’s chief executive said: “Tragically, these figures show that the number of available organs is outstripped by the number of heart patients waiting for a lifeline.
“We hope the rest of the UK will follow Wales’ trailblazing lead.”
This is not consent. The rest of the UK does not need to follow the trailblazing of a bunch of nasty authoritarians who think other people’s bodies belong to them. If they do, I will opt out.
Update: As was to be expected in a totalitarian rag, the Groan carries a piece telling us that our bodies should all belong to the state as we are too squeamish to make the “right” decision.
What happens if I’m visiting Wales and the worst happens? Do my surviving relatives need an export licence to take me and all my organs out of Wales?
There’s a thought. Maybe you need an opt-out card.
I’m struggling to grasp the concept “visiting Wales”. Not something that would come up in my life.
I have always been a supporter of voluntary organ donation (after one is actually dead, obviously). However, I have stopped carrying a donor card, in recent years, simply because the Government and their BMA chums have pretty much told me that my organs are useless, these days. According to them, I eat too much, drink too much and smoke too much, so I can only assume my internal organs are hideously compromised and would be discarded should I meet an untimely death. I don’t plan (at the ripe old age of 42) on dying, any time soon, and my Dr tells me my health is pretty much tip top, so, I will not be donating my organs, anytime soon. Should I meet a sudden and horrific end in the near future, well, I have opted to donate my remaining organs to immediate friends or family, should they need them. Failing that, they get burnt along side the rest of me.
My reaction is similar. I am sick to death of the haranguing I have received from the state, public health and the various parasitic fake charities about my lifestyle choices and please can we have your bits (and if you don’t give ’em, we’ll have ’em anyway). Well, enough is enough. No, dammit.
I’ll do them a disservice and donate my liver.
You might guess I live in Wales so I opted out.
I will not have a socialist nanny statist talking shop (senedd) decide that my body is not my own by default.
Talking to an American colleague she exclaimed “WTF !! that would never ever be allowed over here (USA)”
Yep, me too. I tore up my donor card after that nasty pointy-finger article about the recipient of donated lungs which, it turned out (Shock! Horror!) to have come from a smoker, and later developed cancer. Needless to say, there were the immediate demands from the anti-smoking mob that smokers’ organs shouldn’t be used because they had been “tainted” by smoking. No matter that this suggestion was very quickly shushed by the organ donation people, who realised that such a move would drastically reduce the already-short number of perfectly good smokers’ organs which might save a desperately ill person’s life, and no matter, either that transplant surgeons were quick to point out that (a) contrary to popular myth – much encouraged by the famed coalminer’s lung proudly exhibited on fag packets – that smokers’ lungs, post-mortem, look no different from non-smokers’ lungs and (b) that all organs are thoroughly chemically “cleansed” before transplant in any case; it was too late. The antis’ lack of ability to resist the temptation to seize any opportunity to have yet another “go” at smokers and, more importantly, the lack of reaction from anyone in power to stand up and tell them, loudly and robustly, to keep their big mouths shut for once, saw my own long-standing donor card shredded. And yes, if an opt-out becomes necessary, that’ll be my option, too, for exactly the same reasons as back then.
I was once a blood donor and rather proud of that fact. However, back in 2004 my blood was deemed to be no longer fit for donation, despite me having given enough armfuls to get a Silver badge. The reason given was that I was the recipient of one unit of O+ back in the mid 1990’s and therefore a ‘potential carrier’ of CJD.
I still have my Silver blood donors card as souvenir, but my organ donor card was destroyed on the day I was told my blood was ‘no good’. Here’s a question; if my cadaver fell into the hands of these authoritarian arseholes, does it mean that my organs would be useless for donation under the same criteria?
The state, its quangos and fake charities, and the vile people they all encourage all despise me for choices I make how to live my life. So screw ’em, I wouldn’t give them snot.
As I’m still a regular blood donor (have been for 45+ years), I would just like to say that if certain of my organs were terminally diseased, there are several people to whom I’d love to donate them…
As I’m already leaving this life with less than I came in with, I’d happily donate – except that I too have decided that a society that sneers at me for being a smoker and doesn’t want my organs going into a pub, ain’t getting them to go into a medic’s hands.
I opted out of the NHS data sharing scheme which was then reported as having breached privacy because the system couldn’t cope with the volume of opt outs. What’s the bet that it will be conveniently found not to cope with donor opt out?
Jay