Upcoming Festival Emphasizes Need for Minority Organ Donors

Saturday, the Center for Organ Recovery and Education (CORE) will host a Celebration of Praise Gospel Fest in honor of National Minority Donor Awareness Day. The event will be held at the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in downtown Pittsburgh at 6 p.m.
National Minority Donor Awareness Day, officially on August 1, was established to raise awareness about the shortage of designated donors in the United States, with particular emphasis on the multicultural community.
CORE’s spokesperson, Holly Bulvony, says the need for organ transplantation is great within minority groups, particularly with kidneys, but the amount of organ donors from these groups is small. African Americans and other minority groups are three times more likely to suffer from end-stage kidney disease than Caucasians, yet 73% of organ donors are Caucasian. Bulvony says the key to a donor/recipient match is blood type and race is not a criterion. Because minority patients make up more than half of the national transplant waiting list, the awareness day is meant to encourage more members of the African-American community to become a designated donor.