Worldwide Organ Donation and Human Development

There is a universal shortage of organs available for transplantation leading to thousands of people dying on transplant waiting lists every year. Every country has their own system for organ donation, allocation, and transplantation, leading to vastly different donation rates across countries.

This case study will use superheat to combine two sources of data in order to explore the recent trends in organ donation worldwide and its relation to Human Development using data from the WHO Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation database and Human Development data from The UN.

Specifically, we will compare the organ donation trends of 58 countries over a 9-year time period spanning from 2006-2014, and simultaneously examine the Human Development Index of these countries.

# load in some useful libraries
library(knitr)
library(dplyr)
library(DT)
library(reshape2)

Obtaining the organ data

The organ donation dataset can be downloaded from the WHO Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation database. The Global Observatory on Donation and Transplantation represents the most comprehensive source to date of worldwide data concerning activities in organ donation and transplantation derived from official sources. The data contains a several measurements concerning the number of organ donations by country from 2000-2014.

The searchable table below displays the raw data, much of which is missing. The data contains 19 measurements on various organ donation counts, for 194 countries.

# load in the data
organs.original <- read.csv("raw_data/global-organ-donation.csv")
# place data in an interactive data table
DT::datatable(organs.original, fillContainer = T, 
              height = 600, options = list(scrollY = 350))