Facebook has launched its latest tool where users can share that they are an organ donor, in the hope that it will help save more lives on a daily basis. Facebook users have to go to their timelines, where under ‘Life Event’ they will see a health and wellness section and then you can click to become an organ donor and share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor.

More than 114,000 people in the United States are awaiting organ donations, 79 people daily receive a transplant while 18 die, according to Organdonor.gov. In the UK, National Service Health Service (NHS) pointed out that there are over 10,000 people on the waiting list for an organ, while an average of three people a day die waiting for a transplant.

The new Facebook feature is working in the United States, UK, and Australia but it is expected to expand in other parts of the world. The US previously averaged about 506 new registrations per day, but since Facebook introduced the tool on April 30 more than 24,000 people have registered to donate their organs, according to Donate Life America.

Facebook added the organ donation feature to raise awareness to the issue after CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, took a personal interest in it, partly because of his friendship with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Jobs’s liver transplant extended his life several years.

The move will raise awareness about the critical shortage of organs for people in need of life-saving transplants. It may also create social pressure to inspire Facebook friends to consider registration.

This solidary initiative is seen by many skeptics like another way to obtain personal information concerning our health. Once we become an organ donor our privacy is stripped away, no matter how good Facebook´s intentions, sharing our data with the social network entails releasing information to an unknown companies without our consent. In an indirect way behind our altruistic behavior many big firms will make a killing exchanging information.

This donor program might bring about many successful and happy stories about saving lives, but in the end you are also an information donor, giving away your personal information to a company that can make profit off of it. Medical insurance companies will use our personal medical information to determine our eligibility for insurance coverage for their own protection, allowing health businesses to capitalize on insurance payments for the healthy, whereas others with bad medical history will be overcharged.

Another concern about organ donation is that medical information on Facebook is not protected by U.S. laws. According to the state´s Uniform Anatomical Gift Law, being an organ donor on Facebook is just as good being on the state´s organ donation registry.

Organ donation has never been “private” as it is openly displayed upon a public identification card. The choice of being an organ donor is personal and has to be respected. With the new Facebook feature, this choice becomes a public identity marker, something to be socially shared, commented upon, and potentially, conspicuously absent.

The advocacy group Donate Life American found that many people decline to became an organ donor for diverse reasons: citizens fear that they are not healthy enough or they are too old to donate their organs; others are concerned that doctors will not try their best to save them if they are known to be an organ donor; some people believe there is a black market where organs or tissues are sold; and some citizens question whether or not a person can recover from brain death.

Organ donation, as displayed through Facebook, is at once a deeply personal decision about death and the body, and a public display of generosity, fear, and/or general health. Whether you think that Facebook has made a strong move in a positive direction, or has once again taken sharing too far, the organ donation feature on Facebook embodies the categorical fusion that represents a connected era.

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Facebook has added more than 200 million users in the last year, Twitter now boasts 100 million active users and Linkedln has 64 million users in North America alone.

Social media networks have become more popular with getting to know everything about a person but now Facebook is taking it another step further. Facebook now has an organ donor status that users can choose to post on their profile in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Facebook’s main objective in issuing this new addition to its vast network is not so your friends can know you more on a personal level, but to lower the total number of people that die in the U.S. and the UK due to waiting for an organ transplant. According to the U.S. Department of Health, nearly 7,000 people in the US alone die each year due to waiting for a donor.

The company announced a plan to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages.

Under the Facebook plan, members will be able to declare and update their organ donation status. The status will appear with other biographical information in a section called Health and Wellness, which includes, for example, updates on whether a person has recently lost weight or ever broken a bone.

But some representatives that encourage organ donations explain that people need to understand that posting their organ donation statues on Facebook does not close the deal. People need to also go to their state registry.

The ‘New York Times’ explained in an article that “people declaring on Facebook that they are organ donors could spur others to sign up at motor vehicle departments or online registries however, experts say Facebook could create an informal alternative to such registries that could, even though it carries less legal weight, lead to more organ donations. That is because a disclosure on Facebook could provide the evidence of consent that family members need when deciding whether to donate the organs of a loved one,” said Dr. Andrew M. Cameron, the surgical director of liver transplantation at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

This is not the first time Facebook has tried to use its network to address a social issue. Late last year it launched a service called “lifeline” that allows people to make contact with a suicide-prevention counselor or report someone through Facebook who they fear might be suicidal. That year, the company also introduced tools to discourage bullying and allow people to report episodes of bullying.

Overall, donation rates in the United States have been increasing steadily, with 43 percent of those 18 or older designating themselves as organ donors last year, according to Donate Life America. The median wait for a kidney nationally is about four years, according to data collected for the government by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients. However, waiting lists are maintained on a regional basis, and in areas with high rates of organ failure and low rates of organ donation, the wait can extend much longer.

BJ Fogg, who studies how technology can change attitudes as director of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, explains that Facebook might persuade more people to become organ donors by simple “peer pressure”. If people see more of their friends and family members becoming donors they most likely will want to become one as well.

23-year-old Borough of Manhattan Community College student Luis Mendez said, “I think this will increase the number of donors and decrease the waiting list time because Facebook is pretty much at an all time high and most people follow it. It will be a way to persuade people to become organ donors versus years back.”

Most experts hope that this trend will happen so that being an organ donor will become a norm and more lives can be saved.

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Gift of Life Donor Program – the region’s organ procurement organization (OPO) serving eastern Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey and Delaware– announced that the organization coordinated the recovery of 1,185 organs from a record 441 individuals in 2011, making this region the most generous in the U.S. and setting a new national record.

For the past 4 years, Gift of Life has averaged over 400 donors per year, and serving nearly 10.3 million people in the region, Gift of Life’s procurement of nearly 43 donors-per-million-population ranks among the highest in the world.

For the family of Jillian Shallock, this generosity meant a life-saving heart transplant. On December 1, 2010, 5 month-old Jillian was placed on the pediatric heart transplant list. Baby Jillian had been born with restrictive cardiomyopathy (RCM) earlier that July—a condition which restricted the blood flow to the young girl’s heart. After several months, her parents, Billy and Shannon Shallock, decided to place their daughter on the waiting list for a new heart.

After nearly two months on the transplant waiting list, Jillian received her heart on January 25, 2011—aNew Year’s gift to start the young recipient and her family on the road to a new life. ”It really is hard to think about what our life could have been like had someone not made the decision [to donate]—a decision that saved our daughter’s life,” says Shannon.

Another “first” for Gift of Life took place in fall 2011, when, for the first time in the Delaware Valley, a patient underwent a complex and intricate bilateral hand and arm transplant to significantly enhance the quality-of-life for a multiple limb loss. The procedure was performed by Penn Medicine’s Hand Transplant Program, which operated under the leadership of the Penn Transplant Institute, and was proudly performed in conjunction with Gift of Life.

Another milestone was an unprecedented increase in the number of individuals and families who said “yes” to tissue donation over the last 12 months, with more than 2,700 tissue donors. One tissue donor can save or enhance the lives of more than 50 individuals, and as a result, an estimated number of 45,000 people may be helped from life-enhancing procedures due to the generosity of others.

Additionally, 1,235 musculoskeletal donors provided life-enhancing bone allographs for orthopedic surgeries, skin for burn patients, and heart valves to repair defects in 2011. And Gift of Life is grateful for our 2,500 eye donors, whose corneas have been transplanted used to restore precious sight.

Gift of Life also helped Donate Life America reach its goal in 2011, of registering 100 million people in the United States as organ and tissue donors—nearly 4 million of these selfless individuals were registered in our region, in addition to countless families who have generously said “yes” to donation without previous designation.

But Gift of Life could not have achieved this alone: The hard work and dedication of the region’s 138 hospitals and 15 transplant centers has helped, and their perseverance and dual advocacy for families throughout the transplant process.

“We work closely with Gift of Life to help create the opportunity for meaningful donation, out of what is often a difficult, stressful situation for our donor families,” says Dr. Gerard Fulda, Chief of Surgical Critical Care for Christiana Hospital in Newark, DE. ”Knowing the importance of these gifts helps our staff be dual advocates for both donor families and our transplant recipients.”

Gift of Life works hand-in-hand with medical professionals and continues to give hope to those individuals waiting for life-saving transplants, while supporting the families of our heroic donors—families like that of Francis “Franny” Gessler.

In the fall of 2011, the 30 year-old father suffered a fatal brain aneurysm during a pickup hockey game. His wife Christine and mother Fran were quickly by his side in the hospital, and knew that organ donation was something Francis would have wanted, as a generous and giving father, son and husband.

“We as a family are very religious and deep in faith, so all along, we had hopes for Franny’s recovery,” says Gessler’s mother, Fran. “But when we learned that there wasn’t hope for recovery, we looked at each other and we knew: Franny was the kindest, gentlest kid ever. He would want to save others, so the decision to donate was made. The knowledge that others are living through him is comforting.”

“Families like the Gesslers truly are heroes,” said Gift of Life President and CEO Howard M. Nathan. “We thank those individuals and their loved ones for giving others the gift of a second chance at life in 2011. Moving forward in 2012, we will continue to educate our community about the critical need for more organ and tissue donors and to support families awaiting these critical transplants with programs like our new Gift of Life Family House.”

Opened in summer 2011, Gift of Life Family House is a 30-room facility that provides temporary lodging and supportive services to family members of transplant patients in the Philadelphia region. Resources such as nutritious meals and transportation to regional transplant centers are offered at an affordable cost, to help assist patients and their families on their transplant journey.

Gift of Life is proud to note the excellence of its staff, who have worked hard to make transplantation possible, and offer expanded care for families, both with programs such as the Family House, and with the organization’s continued educational outreach. Gift of Life’s dedication to increasing donation means that donor families like Francis Gessler’s have given patients like little Jillian Shallock’s the gift of learning to walk, talk and grow with her three sisters and loving parents.

Of the 441 organ donors in 2011, 46% were registered as donors on their driver’s license or state-issued IDs. While this number is encouraging, more than 6,500 men, women and children in this region are currently on the waiting list for transplants, and more than 112,000 patients remain on the list nationally.

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January 5 was Jessica Melore’s 30th birthday, a milestone birthday she did not always think she was going to have. At only 16 years old Jessica received a sudden and lifesaving heart transplant. Jessica’s story of hope helps to launch Donate Life America’s bold new initiative, “20 Million in 2012″.

Donate Life America, the national organization promoting organ, eye and tissue donation in the United States, is launching this bold new initiative, “20 Million in 2012″. It focuses on radically increasing the number of people registered on state donor registries. This official launch of the campaign comes on the heels of its announcement during the Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena, CA, where every year since 2004 it has sponsored the Donate Life float.

This year’s float again featured inspirational stories of organ donors and their families, a tradition that the “20 million in 2012″ campaign will continue throughout 2012 as it features powerful stories of those affected by donation. ”I am so proud to be part of Donate Life America’s ’20 Million in 2012′ campaign, as part of the I am HOPE storytelling project,” says Melore.

“New Jersey is the first state to promote the 2012 stories of hope.  Real-life stories like mine can inspire people to sign up to be organ, eye and tissue donors.  These commitments to donation provide hope to the more than 112,000 men, women and children on the organ transplant waiting list, along with the hundreds of thousands more in need of cornea and tissue transplants.”

Additionally, the “20 Million in 2012″ campaign will feature four national Donate Life events during 2012: the Donate Life Flash Mob on March 24th, Donate Life Blue and Green Virtual Fashion Show on April 20th, Donate Life Champions in Fall 2012 and Donate Life Linking Hands for Life all year long.

“In 2012 we are making a bold statement about our commitment to save more lives,” says David Fleming, President and CEO of Donate Life America. “With the majority of individuals in the United States wishing to be organ, eye and tissue donors, the biggest challenge to meeting our goal of 20 million will be getting people to take action and register today as an organ, eye and tissue donor at DonateLifeAmerica.org.”

For more information about the “20 Million in 2012″ campaign or to register to be an organ, eye and tissue donor and join in this lifesaving work, visit www.DonateLifeAmerica.org.

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