Facebook Organ Donation Scheme Fizzles

Information Week Healthcare | Ken Terry
As many as 100,000 Facebook users worldwide signed up to be organ donors last May when the social network added a feature that allowed people to link to organ donation registries. But the number of new donors generated by the Facebook announcement trailed off rapidly, according to a recent commentary in the Bioethics Forum, the blog of the Hastings Center Report.

Written by Blair L. Sadler and Alfred M. Sadler, Jr., MD, founding fellows of the Hastings Center, a bioethics research organization, the article notes that 6,000 people enrolled in 22 state donor registries on May 1, when the Facebook initiative was announced. On a normal day, those registries would have signed up 400 new donors.

But in the weeks and months that followed, the Facebook effect rapidly trailed off. According to data from Donate Life California, the numbers of new donors enrolling in the top four state registries--those of California, Florida, Illinois, and Ohio--returned to pre-announcement levels within a week.

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