There’s a compelling message stenciled on t-shirts worn around the London Health Sciences Centre in London. Ont. It reads, “Don’t take your organs to heaven, because heaven knows we need them here.” Organ donation isn’t an easy thing to discuss around the dinner table, however, and it’s not the stuff you’d find in trucking magazines.

But the push to increase public awareness of organ donation recently got a big boost from an Ontario trucker named Tony Hopp, whose wife Janice had to wait nearly three years for a life-saving liver transplant, spearheaded the move. “The problem is the shortage of available organs,” says Hopp, who drives for Al’s Cartage out of Kitchener. “At any one time, there are about 3600 people on the waiting list for an organ transplant, and about 30% of those are children.”

Canada has a relatively low number of actual organ donors per million people-14, compared to 21 in the U.S. and 31 in Spain. “The process isn’t well understood,” Hopp says. “Some people just aren’t aware of the need for organs, or they still feel transplantation is some kind of experimental black magic. Others have religious beliefs that they think might discourage them from donating, and others are just a bit squeamish about being dissected after death.”

While the wait for donor organs continues for thousands of Canadians, Hopp and London-based Mel Hall Transport are doing a little something about the donor shortage-using trailers as rolling billboards. Hopp says the idea occurred to him while driving home after visiting his wife in hospital. He’d previously been involved with another awareness campaign using a specially painted trailer for an Ontario charity called the Sunshine Foundation. He approached the Ontario Trucking Association, which in turn contacted several trucking companies who would be willing to donate the side of a trailer. Mel Hall Transport was selected because the company could guarantee the trailer would run daily in the busy Windsor-to-Toronto corridor.

The Organ Donor Awareness Committee at London Health Sciences Centre approached 3M Canada for help. Ted Lawson, 3M’s commercial graphics representative, worked with the committee to develop the design and 3M then supplied materials for the project. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd., a pharmaceutical company, sponsored the graphics and installation.

Hopp hopes the campaign capitalizes on the visibility of trucks to deliver a positive message. He would like to see a vastly expanded list of potential donors, people who have signed donor cards and have made their wishes known to family in order to increase the possibility of matching a donor to an eager recipient.

Hopp believes the key to expanding the donor list is to shed more light on the process and to answer some of the awkward questions ahead of time.

It’s a challenge, says Cate Abbott, the information and resources officer at the London hospital’s multi-organ transplant service. First, a suitable donor must be found. “The death must take place within a hospital so we can take immediate steps to preserve the tissue for retrieval,” Abbot explains. Second. the organ and the recipient must be compatible. And third, not all hospitals are set up to co-ordinate and “harvest” an organ.

A hospital patient who has consented to organ donation makes the process less complicated. “It’s a pretty awkward situation,” Abbott says. “But the donor cards make the process much less stressful.”

Janice Hopp did receive a donor liver in May of 1999, by the way, and is currently continuing her anti-rejection drug therapy. She is expected to make a complete recovery.

To request a donor card or for more information, contact Organ Donation Ontario at 416/351-7328, or visit these Web sites: www.lhsc.on.ca/transplant and www.transplant-on.org.