Rise in Western Pa.

In one year, the Center for Organ Recovery and Education, which recovers organs in Western Pennsylvania, more than doubled the number of people who donated organs after dying of an overdose, from 21 in 2015 to 46 in 2016.

This year, CORE, whose area also includes West Virginia and a small portion of New York, is on pace to increase that figure by at least 50 percent. With 34 cases of donation from overdoses through the end of June, it is on pace to have 68 by year’s end.

The dramatic rise in organ donations is the reason CORE set a record for the number of deceased donors from any cause — 237 — in 2016, which also meant a record number of people received life-saving organ transplants.

“‘Record.’ It sounds strange to say it that way,” said Kurt Shutterly, CORE’s chief operating officer. “I’d rather say that we had more donors than we ever had. It’s sad. It’s just tragicwhat is happening.”

With no expectation that it will slow down this year, CORE in January approved increasing the number of organ procurement coordinators — the employees who go to the hospitals to try to persuade families to donate organs and to evaluate the organs themselves — from 15 to 20.

“We’re evaluating more drug-related deaths than ever before,” said Mr. Shutterly, who began with CORE in 2000 as an organ procurement coordinator. “And I don’t see anything changing that right now and that’s a tragedy.”

All United States Source: Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network

Young more likely donors

Gift of Life, the organization that recovers organs there, as well as Delaware and a portion of New Jersey, serves a much larger population than CORE.

It has seen such a dramatic increase in donors from overdoses beyond the 121 cases it had in 2016, which represented 10 percent of all such cases across the country.

“Last year is the first year that [drug overdoses] were a leading mechanism of death for our donors,” said Rick Hasz, Gift of Life’s vice president for clinical services.

Just six years ago, drug overdoses were a distant fifth, behind stroke and hemorrhage, cardiovascular, blunt injuries and gunshots. But if the growth continues at the same pace this year as it had in recent years, overdoses could be the leading mechanism of death in Gift of Life’s region.

One reason for that rise, Mr. Hasz said of research he will soon present at a conference, is “that people dying of drug intoxication are more likely to have a donor status on their drivers’ license than people in other categories.”

That is generally because people who die from overdoses tend to be younger — in their late 20s or early 30s on average — compared to people who die of the other leading mechanisms of death — who are typically in their 40s and 50s.

Older people who die are less likely to sign up to be donors “because they don’t think anyone would want their organs, and they didn’t grow up in the transplant world,” which became regular surgical practice in only the last 30 years, Mr. Hasz said.

The result, he said, is that the “conversion rate” of people who die of an overdose, who are medically qualified for donation and who ultimately donate organs, is much higher — about 80 percent — than the overall rate of about 60 percent.

Decreasing infection risk

Not that long ago, organs from drug overdose victims might have been thought of as a much riskier proposition than they are now.

Intravenous drug users could have been infected with HIV or hepatitis. Until about a decade ago, the only way to test for those infections was to look for the antibodies for either HIV or hepatitis in the donor.

Antibodies for both diseases don’t show up in a person for weeks after the initial infection: about three weeks for HIV and about a month-and-a-half for hepatitis. That means that if a donor had been infected any time within that three- or six-week “window,” the recipient would be accepting the risk that even though the infection was not yet visible, it might be passed on to them through the transplanted organ.

“But the technology for screening for infection has made very, very significant improvements since then,” Dr. Klassen said.

The use of nucleic acid testing, which allows doctors to look into the genetic material of a donor’s cells to seek the infection, had become standard at many places like CORE over the last decade. Five years ago, UNOS mandated that every person who donates an organ across the country go through nucleic acid testing.

Nucleic acid testing can tell if a person contracted either infection in about a week before they died.

“While that still leaves a higher percentage risk, in fact the absolute risk of transmitting infection is very low,” Dr. Klassen said.

UNOS also wants to make sure people understand that, he said, because: “These donors tend to be very good donors. They are typically younger and otherwise healthy.”

Solace for parents

That was certainly true of Patrick McKallip.

He grew up in New Kensington and from the time he was a year old, “his grandmother played baseball with him every day,” said Mrs. Donatelli.

Baseball became his passion, and at 6-foot-3, he was a powerful bat, playing all through high school where he also got good grades. After graduating from Valley High School in 2007, he went to West Virginia University, where he initially wanted to get into pharmacy school.

“Before that, he never had any problems. He was just like any other teenager,” Mr. Donatelli said.

But in Morgantown — “That’s where everything started,” Mr. Donatelli said. At first, it was pain pills, opioids he got from friends at school, not through a prescription.

“He came home for the holidays and you’d see a difference,” he said of his son.

Two years into college, he dropped out and moved into an apartment in New Kensington near his grandmother’s home.

Over the next six years, he was in and out of addiction, a roller-coaster that followed his work life: When he got work during construction season in the spring through fall, he tended to stay off drugs; when he was unemployed in the winter, he got back on them, his parents said.

In 2012 he was arrested for four robberies of opioids from pharmacies in the New Kensington area — the first three in the winter of that year. Not long after those robberies, in May 2012, he and a friend were lauded as heroes for pulling five children from a car that had been involved in a fatal accident near Kennywood Park.

“That was him,” Mr. Donatelli said of the rescue. “He did that instinctively and didn’t give it a thought.”

But ultimately, he couldn’t save himself, despite his family’s best efforts over the next four years that included treatment at recovery centers, once for two months. None of it stuck.

He served some time for the robberies but was released on probation, which he violated in 2015 and was sent back to jail. He got out just before he began the descent that led to his overdose.

Over those years, “we went to counselors, attorneys, pastors, priest, anybody who would listen,” Mr. Donatelli said.

But Mr. McKallip “didn’t