This week, has been profiling people who have dedicated themselves to ensuring people get the gift that keeps on living ? organ donations.

They are organ recipients, the friends and families of people who have lost their lives but whose organs have been given to others, and they are liver and bone marrow donors who have given something of themselves so that others may live.

They all deserve to be honoured for making extraordinary sacrifices.

Some people may have legitimate religious or personal reasons for not becoming donors and those views should be respected.

But many more people do not make themselves available as donors out of lack of awareness or lack of interest.

In the United States alone in 2003, 6,000 people died while waiting for an organ donations.

Bermuda residents have very practical reasons for joining this campaign.

Bermuda has an unusually high number of residents with conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and related kidney problems. Yet the number of people who are organ donors seems to be low.

As of now, there are 78 people in Bermuda on dialysis, up from 66 in 2002. Of that number, 25 people are on kidney transplant lists and are waiting for a donor, up from 16 two years ago.

There are 28 people in Bermuda who have received kidney transplants are still living, but many have had to wait five to six years to either find a living person with a match, or a cadaver.

While dialysis itself is something of a medical miracle, enabling patients to have a semblance of normality in their lives, it is also clear that those people who have received kidney transplants are able to enjoy a much better quality of life without dietary restrictions or the requirements of spending nine hours a week hooked up to a machine.

For that reason alone, Bermuda residents should become donors.

As Marianne Herbert, Bermuda's transplant coordinator, said of kidney recipients in this newspaper two years ago: "The prospect of a better life is exciting, but at the same time, there may be a feeling of sadness that a family somewhere has lost a loved one.

"At this time, we have to stay focused on the positive aspects of the situation and can only hope that the decision to donate organs and help so many people can give the family of the deceased person some comfort at such a difficult time.

"As one of our kidney transplant recipients so aptly put it: 'Not a day goes by when I am not grateful to my donor.' "

Ms Herbert said this week that the number of living donors are now beginning to exceed the number of transplants taken from people who have died, although rigourous tests must be conducted on living donors to ensure that the organ is healthy.

Unfortunately, many are not, as the potential donors themselves have high blood pressure or diabetes problems.

That should spur people on to living better and healthier lives, but it should not deter donors from seeing of they are a match for a person now praying for a transplant.

There is not greater gift than that of live, whether it arises out of a tragedy or out of sheer altruism.