COTA Teen Savannah Anselmo, Liver Transplant Recipient
August is National Multiethnic Donor Awareness Month. This national observance was initiated in 1998 as a single day to increase our nation’s consciousness of the need for more organ and tissue donors from multicultural backgrounds. In 2020, this nationwide effort was expanded to encompass the entire month of August.
National Multiethnic Donor Awareness Month honors communities of color who have been organ and tissue donors and encourages others to register as donors.
It is about empowering multicultural communities to save and heal lives. Although organs are not matched according to ethnicity, and people of different races frequently match one another, individuals waiting for a transplant have a better chance of receiving an organ if there are large numbers of donors from their ethnic background. This is because compatible blood types and tissue markers (critical qualities for donor/recipient matching) are more likely to be found among members of the same ethnicity.
COTA’s Anselmo family of Miramar, Florida, knows these facts all too well. Their daughter, Savannah, was born in December 2006. Five months later, she was diagnosed with biliary atresia – a deadly liver disease with only one known cure … a liver transplant. Three days after hearing this devastating news, her father called the Children’s Organ Transplant Association to see how they might be able to help this young family whose world had literally been turned upside down.
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