Organ Donation

Kim Cunningham mourns her infant daughter; Carol Bryon oversees her year-old son's recovery from a life-threatening liver disease. This is the difference a few weeks can make in the world of organ transplants.The two women met at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore this year and shared the anguish of waiting for organ donations that mightsave their children's lives. Now they share a cause: banging the drum for more people to become organ donors."They say 10 percent of the people who could be organ donors actually are," said Bryon, of Davidsonville, who founded Donor Organ National Out Reach.

Better care for accidents victims, increased seat belt use and tougher drunken driving laws have saved more lives, but not without a cost -- fewer organ donors for patients needing transplants.Because the number of typical donors of the past -- the 18- to 35-year-old accident victims -- is decreasing, officials at Johns Hopkins Hospital are stepping up efforts to find more people willing to donate organs and are considering elderly donors who might not have been candidates before.The hospital's efforts to increase public awareness about the need for organ donors includes an education program for religious leaders to inform them about ways they can spread the word among their congregations.

CHICAGO - Socialist and communist governments have nationalized all sorts of things: oil and gas fields, phone companies, steel mills, coal mines, airlines and farms. Now the American Medical Association, which generally does not favor collective ownership of the means of production, has proposed to go even further. It suggests nationalizing corpses. The United States has a severe shortage of kidneys, livers, lungs and other human organs needed by patients awaiting transplants. The AMA thinks we might close the gap between supply and demand by confiscating body parts from people who no longer need them.

Q: My wife and I have left instructions for cremation upon our demise. We have recently signed and now carry "donor cards" for any organs that may be needed. If a body is taken to a hospital for organ donation, who is responsible for the costs? What happens to the rest of the body? Does the hospital then dispose of the body? How, and at whose expense? -- M.R. Caris, Boca Raton, Fla.Q: In regard to the column about the donation of organs at death, I had heard awhile back that the estate of the donor had to pay for the expense of organ removal.

Monica Savage, a 13-year-old Columbia girl who is awaiting a heart transplant, had a wish come true last night when "Scotty," the engineer from the Starship Enterprise, was "beamed up" to her seventh-floor room at Johns Hopkins Hospital.James Doohan, who portrayed Scotty on the "Star Trek" television series and movies, visited the Owen Brown Middle School eighth-grader after appearing at a computer show yesterday at Timonium Fairgrounds."It was pretty neat," said Monica, who has been waiting 10 weeks for a new heart.

Top-ranked Southern of Baltimore will be one of eight boys basketball teams that will play in the fifth annual DeMatha Invitational on Jan. 26 at MCI Center in Washington. The Bulldogs (7-2), ranked 14th nationally by USA Today, is scheduled to face Paul VI of Fairfax, Va., at 6 p.m. in the third game of the five-game event. Paul VI is led by 6-foot-10 Stanford-bound center Robert Little and 5-10 guard Dennis Bowden, who helped his Amateur Athletic Union team to a semifinal berth at the Big Time Tournament.

After spending yesterday morning in church, Roxanne King felt enlightened - but not in the typical Sunday kind of way. At her West Baltimore church, St. James Episcopal, King listened to an appeal for blacks to consider becoming organ donors. She heard about the long lists of sick people waiting for livers, kidneys and hearts. And she heard how many of those people are African-American. Before all that, King said, there was "no way" she'd have been a donor. And she's still not sure. The difference is that now she's willing to think about it. "Right now there is a possibility," she said.

Here's an irony: Stricter safety laws and improved care for accident victims are saving more lives, but meanwhile more people in need of a transplant are dying while waiting for a suitable organ.Trauma victims have long provided a steady pool of organ donors, especially the kind of donors transplant specialists have preferred - healthy adults between 18 and 35 whose lives were abruptly ended and whose bodies weren't ravaged by disease or too many years of wear and tear.The good news that fewer young lives are ending tragically has been bad news for the 23,000 people in this country who are waiting for an organ transplant and wondering whether it will come in time.

Organ donation wrings solace from tragedy I thank reporter Diana K. Sugg for her poignant reminder of the importance of organ donation ("Celebrating a life, honoring one lost," Feb. 15). In the face of grief, a donor's family is asked to perform a noble act of humanity. Consent brings continuity and perhaps some degree of solace from sparing another family such a tragic loss. In 2003, more than 80,000 people in the United States will await life-saving transplants - and 2,000 of them are children.

To many sports fans, the idea of rooting for a knee might seem absurd. To the people who loved Julie De Rossi, it makes all the sense in the world. Two years ago, they lost this hard-charging woman who raced cars and loved music. A drunken driver traveling 117 mph on a Houston roadway brought a violent end to her life. But somewhere in this country, De Rossi's liver is keeping someone alive. Elsewhere, her kidneys are doing the same. And in Cincinnati tonight, her Achilles' tendon will support Bengals quarterback Carson Palmer as he faces the Ravens.