The shortage of sperm donors causes problems for many fertility patients, but apparently a novel project aimed at helping to solve the problem in Ireland was so overwhelmed with volunteers that it couldn't cope and has had to close.
The aim of this pilot scheme was to offer anyone who was willing to become a sperm donor free tickets to the European music festival of their choice, which would be paid for by fertility clinics. However, the website offering the deal was swamped with men wanting sperm donation packs, and the scheme had to be put in hold.
It wasn't entirely clear from the details I read how the samples were to be screened, or what information about the donors was to be kept, but it does raise interesting questions about how we recruit sperm donors, and whether schemes like this may be a way to generate interest at the very least.
The website itself is now closed to new donors, but you can have a look at it at www.spermfortickets.com
(PS If you're interested in this, read the comments below - the sperm for tickets scheme wasn't ever functional, although many men did try to register - perhaps there's a lesson to be learnt here about how to recruit more donors!)
Sadly this was a hoax:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.sciencepunk.com/v5/2008/03/funky-spunk-sperm-for-tickets-is-a-hoax/
Anyone wishing to be a donor in the UK should see http://www.ngdt.co.uk
I don't know of an equivalent site for Ireland, but the NGDT could probably tell prospective donors who to talk to.
Thanks for that, Mark - and for the link to NGDT! I'd come across this on The Guardian website, and it did strike me at the time that it was odd that it hadn't had more publicity - now I know why!
ReplyDeleteHowever, if it helped raise awareness of the current shortage of donors, perhaps it wasn't entirely a bad thing...