Are you an eye donor? If not, you could be in about two minutes.
That’s all the time it takes to visit the Alabama Eye Bank (AEB) website at www.alabamaeyebank.org. Once there you’ll find a link that opens a file at Legacy Alabama, a state registry for organ, tissue and eye donation, where you can join more than 1.4 million other Alabamians who have said yes to donation. There is no cost to sign the registry.
Saying yes is all a part of the annual focus of National Eye Donor Month each March. This year the Eye Bank Association of America (EBAA) announced that Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) will proclaim March 2007 National Eye Donor Month. Senator Brown, a former Representative and member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Health, has long championed the cause of donation and particularly the needs of the nation’s eye banks.
National Eye Donor Month has been proclaimed every year since 1983 to raise awareness of the need to donate eyes. The Alabama Eye Bank is celebrating its 38th year this year. During this time AEB has recovered more than 55,000 tissues and aided in providing tissue for more than 30,000 transplants, ranking among the top 10 Eye Banks in the world for 23 years in a row.
“We’re very excited about the Legacy Alabama donor registry because it offers such a quick and easy way for anyone with access to the Web to become a donor. National Eye Donor Month is a great time to emphasize the ongoing need to help the blind and at the same time focus on the tremendous opportunity to donate through the registry,” Joseph Beckham, AEB director of Education & Hospital Relations, said.
A corneal transplant is the most successful human tissue transplant performed today. The cornea has no blood supply so it does not require blood typing, tissue typing and donor-recipient matching that other organs require. Since the applications for eye tissue ranges from transplant to research to education, there are very few conditions that would preclude the acquisition of donor tissue. It is important to understand that every eye obtained serves an important purpose.
A charter member of the EBAA, AEB is a nonprofit charitable organization that was founded in 1969. The Eye Bank’s headquarters is located in Birmingham with regional offices in Huntsville, Mobile and Montgomery. The Eye Bank’s objective is to obtain quality human eye tissue and distribute it to qualified physicians where the need exists anywhere in the world.
