Patients, Donors Increasingly Turn to Internet as Transplant Matchmaker

A growing number of patients desperately waiting for organ transplants are seeking -- and apparently occasionally finding -- Samaritans willing to be living donors by posting appeals on various sites on the Internet.

"We're seeing it more and more frequently on Web sites," said Deborah Surlas, chairwoman of the patient affairs committee for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which coordinates distribution of cadaver organs to patients on hospital waiting lists.

Leonard Becker, 65, of Berkeley, CA, described in a San Francisco Chronicle article how he posted a "desperate appeal" for a kidney on a San Francisco online forum called Craigslist, and soon had a response from a 30-year-old Albany woman.

Autumn Kruse said after talking on the phone with Becker and his wife, she researched the health risks for living kidney donors, and after concluding that the risk was low, offered Becker a kidney.

The Beckers then paid to fly Kruse and her mother to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, where Becker and Kruse were put through a battery of psychological and physical evaluations.

"We were appropriately concerned," said Dr. Mark Stegall, head of the Mayo transplant program. "After our questioning of the donor, our group felt this was truly an altruistic act and it was appropriate to go through with the transplant. It's an unusual situation. There aren't that many altruistic people. They do exist, and it's great they do."

While Becker's Internet appeal in fact resulted in his receiving a kidney transplant, experts believe that relatively few patients have found donors -- or donors recipients -- using this method of communication. Nevertheless, efforts to use the Internet as a transplant matchmaker are clearly growing.

Postings of offers of organs from would-be Samaritan donors now appear regularly on the "Living Unrelated Donor Forum" on the South-Eastern Organ Procurement Foundation's Web site.