…compliance to the terms of his probation for the next three months. Burgess said “The lady said we need your parole information and your probation info. He said, ‘why?’ We need you to be on good behavior for three to four months before you can give your son the kidney. And January 2018 we will think about re-evaluating you basically.”
“That’s all I ever wanted was a son. And I finally got him, and he’s in this situation,” he said. If Dickerson remains on the right track, he’ll be able to donate his kidney to AJ in January. But Carmella believes it may be too late. She told local CBS affiliate that AJ’s body is starting to fail and he requires bladder surgery.
African Americans have higher rates of diabetes and high blood pressure than Caucasians, increasing the risk of organ failure. African Americans make up 13% of the population, 34% of those waiting for a kidney, and 25% of those waiting for a heart.
At transplant centers with the highest disparities pertaining to living organ donation, African Americans had 76 percent lower odds of obtaining a kidney from a living donor. Even at the facilities that came closest to equality, African Americans were still 35 percent less likely to obtain a transplant from a living donor.
There are more than 92,000 people waiting for a kidney in the United States, and over a third of those are African Americans. In 2011, there were 5,771 living donor transplants performed –the lowest rate in ten years — but only 813 of those kidneys were received by African Americans.