The background

The European Union is an achievement that has qualified our national life, a goal that has been reached and at the same time an indispensable condition for prefiguring new and better horizons. As an extraordinary and challenging opportunity for meeting, planning and effective cooperation, the European scenario is therefore the ideal place to address the topic of organ donation for transplantation purposes, which is inevitably a collective heritage: an expression of ethics and sensitivity, certainly declined in private and personal ways, it is a topic that must be firmly relaunched as a shared social need.

An international meeting was held in Coccaglio on 19 May 2019 as a preliminary opportunity to assessing the possible construction of a European Federation of Organ Donors (EFOD), with the aim of promoting an international debate on the issues of organ donation. The meeting was attended by the president of AIDO Italy, Flavia Petrin, and the president of France ADOT, Marie Claire Paulet, as well as Giovanni Ravasi, president of Lombardy Regional AIDO group, and Rosaria Prandini, president of Brescia Provincial AIDO group, who, together with Lino Lovo, president of the Coccaglio Local AIDO group and vice-president of Brescia Provincial AIDO group, promoted the initiative. From the friendly and impassioned exchange of views between the two national chairwomen, all the differences between the laws of their respective countries emerged, and it was emphasised that the possibility of access to an international donation system could make up for the shortage of organs that considerably reduces the number of people on the waiting list.

The objective, which we hope will evolve into the most concrete results, is to pursue the founding path, which we imagine will be laborious, of a European Federation fo Organ Donors, which can be “a place of thought, study and also of political and value promotion of donation throughout Europe” and a prerequisite for a European organ donation system that overcomes, even in the light of different religious and cultural interpretations, the countless barriers between races and nations, and configures organ donation for what we believe it is: a precisely universal value and a gesture as noble as the act that gave us life.