“I KNOW I sound kind of crazy, but I don’t have any doubts,” says Brittany Burton. “It’s a little bit of a sacrifice, but I’m sure it’s the right thing to do.” Burton, a 27-year-old high-school counsellor from Durham, North Carolina, is talking about donating one of her kidneys to someone she met on the internet.
To voluntarily have one of your internal organs removed and given to a stranger does sound a bit crazy. But lately I’ve been speaking to quite a few people who deem it perfectly rational, and who struggle to understand why more people don’t do it.
“If something bad happened, of course I’d be disappointed, but I’d know I’m helping someone else,” Burton says. “It seems worth it.” This could be the last time I speak to her before her operation, and I hope she is right.
Jeopardising your future health to donate a kidney to a loved one is understandable. But doing it for a complete stranger is a different matter. Nonetheless, people who are willing to become altruistic kidney donors are more common than you might think. And some in the world of transplant medicine are trying to capitalise on this generosity. The hope is that if we can understand why people do it, and encourage more to, it could end the agony of people dying for lack of a donor organ.
One place this is particularly evident is the UK, where official attitudes to altruistic organ donation are undergoing a transformation. Until about 10 years ago, anyone seeking to give a kidney to a stranger was thought to be