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| Photo courtesy of thomascrampton.com |
How do you connect over social
media sites like Facebook?
Birthdays?
Hometowns?
Colleges?
Work
experience?
What
about organ donation?
As
of Tuesday, May 1, Facebook users can now connect
with others by posting their organ donor status on their timeline.
Mark
Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, said in a statement
released yesterday that he hopes this will be a way to bring about awareness of
organ donation and encourage others to become donors.
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| Photo courtesy of content.usatoday.com |
The
initiative, inspired by recent natural disasters such as the 2011 earthquake
and tsunami in Japan, has gotten mixed reviews.
Some
argue with
the privacy issues Facebook has had, fooling with people’s health records is
not a good idea.
Others
remind the skeptics that a person still needs to register to become an organ
donor no matter what his or her Facebook may say.
With
anything you do on the Internet, uncertainties arise, but as Zuckerberg said
in his statement, Facebook is not only a way to connect with others and share
information, but it has also become a way to address issues that affect us all.
As
I previously wrote
in a blog post on organ donation, more than 110,000 patients in America wait
for organ transplants. That means it would only take about 1.2 percent of the
900-million Facebook population to take every American off the donor transplant
list.
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| Photo courtesy of digitaltrends.com |
Who
knows what affect Facebook’s new initiative really will have on decreasing this
number, but as Zuckerberg said,
“… the Facebook community has also shown us that simply through sharing and
connecting, the world gets smaller and better. Even one individual can have an
outsized impact on the challenges facing another, and on the world.”
Be
that one individual who chooses to be proud of his or her choice to become an
organ donor. You never know what kind of inspiration you might be for others.
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