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Organs for Sale? by: Brittany Fortier, September 11, 2009 For those in need of a kidney transplant, it can be a difficult journey to find a willing donor. Circumstances have become so desperate for those waiting for a posthumous kidney that they sometimes resort to advertising their need on billboards and websites. Even worse, some may turn to the black market. On August 24, 2009, the American Enterprise Institute discussed these issues with Dr. Sally Satel, a resident scholar at AEI and beneficiary of a kidney transplant. Satel argued that the best way to procure more organ donations is to...

Cass Sunstein is another of member of President Obama's administration. His nomination to head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has been stuck in committee since June because of his extreme ideas. Sunstein is an advocate of something called libertarian paternalism, which means give people the choice to make their own decisions, but instead of just laying out the facts, control the number of choices, then use knowledge of behavioral sciences (like psychology) to guide them to do what you want. In other words treat the voters the way you treat young children. Sunsteins most famous "different" position...

Kidney donor cries foul when recipient ditches Christianity TUPELO — Aleta Smith, who donated her kidney to a 20-year-old college student last year, wants it back now that the student has changed religions. Smith, a self-described "on-fire Christian," gave her kidney to Hannah Felks, a Lutheran and regular Christian camp counselor, last year after seeing Felks on the local news. "She was going to die unless she got a kidney," Smith says, sitting on the porch at her home. "They portrayed her as this nice Christian girl who works with kids. I saw it as a great opportunity to help...

Most people have a strong aversion to the idea of receiving a donor organ from a killer, a study suggests. Those questioned said they would be far happier receiving a transplant from someone with a good moral background, the Cheltenham Science Festival heard. It follows on from research which found one in three organ transplant patients believe they have taken on some aspects of the donor's personality. < snip > They were shown pictures of strangers and asked to rate how happy they would be to receive an organ from them. The students were then shown the photos a second...

A district attorney says no crimes were committed by officials at a northwestern Pennsylvania hospital when organs were harvested from an 18-year-old Ohio man who suffered a head injury while snowboarding. Erie County District Attorney Brad Foulk says Friday his review of the medical files shows the hospital followed proper procedures in declaring Gregory Jacobs dead and getting permission to take his organs in March 2007.

People who donate a kidney live just as long and are just as healthy as those with two kidneys, according to a new study by University of Minnesota researchers that is the largest ever done on the long-term health consequences of donation. The study provides reassurance about the safety of kidney donation that could encourage more organ donations at a time when the need for such transplants is on the rise. Today there are 78,000 people on the kidney transplant list, and most will not survive the five- to seven-year wait for a kidney from a deceased donor. "I'm hoping...

The United States recently passed a tragic milestone. For the first time, there are more than 100,000 Americans waiting for an organ transplant. If recent history is any guide, more than 6,000 of them will die waiting this year. The outrage is that the federal government makes it extremely difficult to find a donor. A law to prevent the buying and selling of organs has had the unintended consequence of discouraging almost all incentives to donate, including state tax deductions. Arlen Specter (R., Pa.) is trying to convince his Senate colleagues to pass a life-saving rewrite. It wasn't supposed to...

GULFPORT -- With what she says was inspiration from above, Deborah King made her decision when it was clear her 11-year-old son wasn't going to survive the illness that hit him Saturday. King donated her son Cameron Emanuel King's organs, knowing it was what the child, remembered by friends for his generosity, would want. And the move has given hope to other families waiting for organs for their seriously ill children, which Cameron's survivors said comforts them. "The Lord just laid it on my heart," King said. "He was a healthy little boy and he said he always wanted...

CALIFORNIA, November 6, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A San Francisco surgeon is undergoing trial for allegedly hastening the death of a terminally ill patient to harvest his vital organs. The case against Hootan Roozrokh is believed to be the first of its kind brought against an American transplant surgeon.Rosa Navarro, the patient’s mother, successfully filed suit against the hospital where the patient died and received $250,000 in compensation. Now the District Attorney’s office is pressing charges against the 34-year-old surgeon for “dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and prescribing controlled substances without a legitimate medical purpose.”Roozrokh is also being charged...

OXFORD, UK, October 24, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - According to Dr. Julian Savulescu, the Uehiro Chair of Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, and neonatologist and Oxford graduate student Dominic Wilkinson, bold steps may have to be taken to increase the supply of organs for transplant. This, they say in a co-authored article published today, could be accomplished by removing one simple impediment - the requirement of donor "death." In a separate article, published last week, Wilkinson suggested an even more radical plan – mandatory organ donation. "We could abandon the dead donor rule," wrote the pair in today’s article,...

MELBOURNE, Australia, October 21, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A prominent Melbourne doctor has written that, contrary to popular belief, most organ donations take place before the donor is actually dead.  He argues that the vague criterion of "brain death" has blinded potential donors to the fact that their organs are often harvested while they are still alive.Pediatric intensive care specialist Dr. James Tibballs published his controversial views in the Journal of Law and Medicine earlier this month, calling upon medical institutions to review their organ harvesting guidelines to ensure that donors know that they may be volunteering to surrender their life...

LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, an attorney for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, and a leading monitor of bioethics issues such as assisted suicide, euthanasia and human cloning. File this in the “As If We Don't Already Have Enough to Worry About” file: Leading members of the organ transplantation community—backed by some bioethicists—have been waging a quiet campaign for more than ten years to do away with the “dead donor rule,” a crucial ethical protection that requires donors of non paired vital organs to have died before their...

VATICAN, September 3, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Only a few weeks after a prominent article appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine noting that 'brain death' does not constitute true death, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano has carried a front-page article noting that a declaration of 'brain death' cannot be considered the end of life in light of new scientific research. Such a determination would prohibit single vital organ donation, such as heart transplants, for Catholics or Catholic institutions, since Catholic teaching requires such organ donors to be truly dead.  If potential donors cannot be said with certainty to be...

BOSTON, August 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In an article that is sure to rock the world of organ donation, the highly respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has backed up the objections of various pro-life groups, as well as some scientists and physicians, to certain types of organ donation which involve the removal of vital organs from patients believed to be dead. The problem, say the authors of the NEJM article, is that in many cases these patients may not be dead at all.  Key experts in the medical field have, since its inception, considered the 1968 invention of...

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Three new reports challenge current guidelines on how long after cardiac death doctors must wait before taking a heart from an infant organ donor. There's no question that organ donation saves lives, and there's also no question that there aren't enough donor organs to save everyone on the transplant list. However, deciding who is a suitable organ donor, particularly when the potential donor is an infant, is not so clear-cut. Most people are familiar with the concept of organ donation after brain death, but organ donation is also permissible after cardiac death. Cardiac death...

South Los Angeles resident Erlyne Toney-Alvarez, 67, had always planned to be cremated when she died. Simple. Inexpensive. Graves, she said, are a waste of land occupied by the dead. Then she saw the intricately plastinated bodies at the Body Worlds exhibit at the California Science Center -- bodies that had been stripped of their fat, filled with plastics and shown off in all their muscular, organic and anatomical glory for the world to see in traveling shows. Now that, she thought, is the way she wants to go. "I was so excited," she said of seeing the exhibit with...

By the time she was found, her body had become stiff with rigor mortus. (Charleston, West Virginia)—According to the AP report, West Virginia resident, Val Thomas' heart stopped last Saturday morning, and by the time she was found, her body had become stiff with rigor mortus. (Photo: AP)Paramedics were able to revive her, but only after an estimated 15 minutes without oxygen or a pulse—she was rushed to an area hospital. During procedures to lower her body temperature, Val's heart stopped two more times.The Thomas family was told by doctors that Val had only a 10 percent chance of...

(edit)Kelly, 61, who is also a retired Marine sergeant, was immediately tested to see if he was a match, and as luck would have it, he was.“It was really admirable to see these two men who had defied fear in battle and situations of severe adversity to come together,” Molmenti told FOXNews.com. “Now they’re fighting the biggest fight of their whole lives and they're helping each other with this precious gift.” (edit)

(CBS) Fifteen-year-old Alex Koehne died suddenly last year from what doctors thought was Meningitis. "He said, 'Mommy, am I going to die?', and I said, 'No baby, they're going to make you all better,' his mother, Lisa Koehne remembers. CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes reports his devastated parents took some solace in knowing that his death would give others new life. His mother says organ donation is very important to the family. "Alex always knew what he wanted." Alex's liver went to a 52-year-old man. His pancreas to a 36-year-old woman. His kidneys went to two different men, one 46...

ROCKFORD, Ill. — The heart transplant that saved Brian Troy was made possible by a fellow Marine. Troy, 43, of Rockford, served as a Marine in the 1980s. He was dying of an inherited heart condition in 2006 when he received a new heart in a transplant. The donor was 23. Troy didn't know much more than that. Then Troy saw headlines about the murder of a 23-year-old Marine. He read about how Ricky Martinez survived two tours in Iraq, but he was shot to death in Chicago in a case of mistaken identity. The gunman thought a passenger in...

A woman claims to have undergone a complete "personality transplant" after receiving a new kidney. Cheryl Johnson, 37, says she has changed completely since receiving the organ in May. She believes that she must have picked up her new characteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm. Now, not only has her personality changed, the single mother also claims that her tastes in literature have taken a dramatic turn. Whereas she only used to read low-brow novels, Dostoevsky has become her author of choice since the transplant. Miss Johnson, from Penwortham, in Preston, Lancs, said: "You...

New Jersey would become the first state in the country to require people renewing or obtaining a driver's license to decide whether they are willing to become registered organ donors under a bill a Senate committee approved today. The "New Jersey Hero Act" (S755) also would make New Jersey the first state to require high school health classes to teach the importance of organ donation. The Senate Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens Committee unanimously approved the bill over the objections of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. MVC Chief of Staff Denise Coyle said neither the commission's 30-year-old computer...

You can kill a horse to make pet food in California, but not to feed a person. You can hoist a woman over your shoulder while running a 253-meter obstacle course in the Wife-Carrying World Championship in Finland, but you can’t hold a dwarf-tossing contest in France. You can donate a kidney to prevent a death and be hailed as a hero, but if you take any money for your life-saving offer in the United States, you’ll be jailed. These prohibitions are not imposed because of concerns about health or safety or unfair practices, some economists say, but because people...

LOS ANGELES: In what's being called a major advance in organ transplants, doctors say they have developed a technique that could free many patients from having to take anti-rejection drugs for the rest of their lives. The treatment involved weakening the patient's immune system, then giving the recipient bone marrow from the person who donated the organ. In one experiment, four of five kidney recipients were off immune-suppressing medicines up to five years later. "There's reason to hope these patients will be off drugs for the rest of their lives," said Dr David Sachs of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston,...

Organs to be taken without consent By Patrick Hennessy and Laura Donnelly  Last Updated: 9:21pm GMT 12/01/2008     Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.   There are more than 8,000 patients waiting for an organ donation   Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year. The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted...

OTTAWA, January 10, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Earlier this week, the federal government came under attack after the CBC reported that active homosexual men are barred from being organ donors because of the high risk of disease associated with homosexual activity. The Globe and Mail reported yesterday, however, that transplant groups denied that active homosexual men are barred from donating organs. "Several transplant organisations" told the Globe that the rules that came into effect in December only "formalize" existing procedures that screen organs for disease. Mark Meloche, head of the surgery section at the British Columbia Transplant Society said, "We will...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- What may have been a mistake at a Texas hospital is being called a miracle by the parents of a Frederick man who was critically injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. For more than six hours on Monday, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol classified Zack Dunlap as the state's 610th motor vehicle fatality of the year. Troopers removed Dunlap's name from the list the same day after learning he showed signs of life shortly before his organs were to be harvested for transplant. Dunlap was hurt about 7:30 p.m. on Saturday while riding his four-wheeler on a Tillman...

CHICAGO - A woman in her 30s who is one of the four organ transplant patients infected with HIV and hepatitis was not told that the infected donor was high risk, and had previously rejected another donor "because of his lifestyle," her attorney said. Attorney Thomas Demetrio filed a petition Thursday in Cook County Circuit Court on behalf of the woman, asking officials to keep a hospital and an organ procurement center from destroying or altering any records involving the donation. "She's really a mess right now," Demetrio said of the Chicago-area woman. "She's still in shock." The patient, identified...

The Inconvenient Truth About Organ Donations Physician sounds alarm about unethical or at least highly questionable practices of organ transplant industry By Steve Jalsevac September 19, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - There has been growing concern over the past several years about increasingly aggressive measures undertaken to harvest human organs from dying patients. Dr. John Shea, a Toronto physician who has specialized in researching the issue, has just completed a report, Organ donation: The inconvenient truth, that sounds an alarm about the unethical or at least highly questionable practices of the organ transplant industry. The article is published in the September issue...

EXCLUSIVE    NHS sends organs on coaches     By EMMA MORTONAugust 27, 2007   SKINT NHS bosses are using National Express coaches to transport organs for transplants.  And The Sun can reveal it meant an EYE went missing on its way to hospital.It was sent in a box on a coach and disappeared on the way to Northampton General.Hospitals should use private ambulances to carry the organs. But many have axed the contracts to save money.Delivery firm TNT was due to collect the eye — for a cornea transplant — from Northampton bus station where it had been taken...

The Ministry of Health is gearing up to introduce a nationwide definition of brain death to facilitate human organ transplants, said Vice-Minister Huang Jiefu. The authorities will start mapping out the criteria needed to define brain death in October. Huang made the remarks at the just concluded China Organ Transplant Forum in Beijing, which was organized to bring together experts to provide suggestions on how the legislation and standards governing organ transplants could be improved. "Determining the criteria is the key to our most important goal - producing legislation on brain death," Huang said. It is officially estimated that 2...

(HONG KONG)--Paul Lee got his liver from an executed Chinese prisoner; Karam in Egypt bought a kidney for his sister for $5,300; in Istanbul Hakan is holding out for $30,700 for one of his kidneys. They are not so unusual: a dire shortage of donated organs in rich countries is sending foreigners with end-stage illnesses to poorer places like China, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Colombia and the Philippines to buy a new lease of life. Lee, a 53-year-old chief subway technician in Hong Kong, was diagnosed with liver cancer in January 2005 but doctors denied him a transplant because they feared...

Mainland China's well known media Southern Weekly , published a front page article titled "China Puts A Stop on 'Organ Transplant Tourism'" on July 19, 2007. The article reported on the recent restrictions imposed on organ transplants performed on foreigners by Chinese hospitals, and exposed the inside story behind these organ transplants in Mainland China, which are performed under the rule of the Communist Party. A Very Profitable Business Organ transplants skyrocketed after 1999 and hospitals reaped huge profits. The Southern Weekly mentioned that "liver transplants increased at a shocking rate: in 1999 only 24 liver transplants were performed; in...

Last November (2006) this discussion was on-going. Any news update? At a meeting today and tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation is expected to recommend that states adopt policies of "presumed consent" for organ donation. Dr. Peter Lawler declared that the very idea that people own their organs was an "offense [to] dignity." In other words, authorities could harvest organs from your dead body without prior permission from you or your family.

A San Francisco transplant surgeon was criminally charged today with allegedly attempting to hasten the death last year of a 26-year-old disabled man on life support in order to harvest his organs more quickly. The charges are the first in the nation against a physician for his role in a transplant and are sure to raise further uneasiness about a somewhat controversial practice in which organs are retrieved before a patient is brain-dead. The San Luis Obispo County district attorney's office accused Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, 33, of dependent adult abuse, administering a harmful substance and prescribing an unlawful controlled substance...

A doctor has been charged with deliberately hastening the death of a disabled man so that he could harvest his kidneys for another patient, in the first case of its kind in America. The case centres on allegations that Hootan Roozrokh, a transplant surgeon in California, ordered a nurse to administer lethal doses of narcotic painkillers and sedatives to Ruben Navarro, who was terminally ill, after taking him off life support. The man died hours later. Prosecutors claim that Dr Roozrokh, 33, acted without a legitimate medical purpose in his handling of Mr Navarro, 25, who suffered from a neurological...

Brave New World - Muslim Doctor Jihad in America Resumes: Muslim Doc Kills Patient for Organs By Debbie Schlussel www.debbieschlussel.com July 31, 2007 Remember "Kurtlar Vadisi - Irak," the Turkish state-sponsored anti-American, anti-Semitic movie that alleges a new blood libel of Jewish, American, and U.S. Army doctors killing Muslims to harvest their organs? It starred Gary Busey as the Jewish-American Army doctor who killed Muslims for organs for Jews in New York, Tel Aviv, and London. Both I and my father, H.L. Schlussel, MD, wrote about it on this site. Well, guess what? In real life, guess who's actually murdering...

England, July 17, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Britain's Chief Medical Officer has urged that in order to meet the growing organ transplant demand, legislation should make organ donation the default for patients.Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson stated in Britain's annual health report this year that the United Kingdom needs three times the number of organ donors on the National Health Service (NHS) register, the Guardian Unlimited reports. He referred to the present situation in the UK as a transplant "crisis."Donaldson said: "To meet the current demand for organs, the number of people on the NHS donor register would need to...

LONDON (Reuters) - Everyone should be treated as a potential organ donor unless they explicitly ask to opt out of the system, the chief medical officer said on Tuesday. Sir Liam Donaldson said reversing the current system would help tackle a chronic organ shortage that leads to the deaths of hundreds of patients on waiting lists each year. "There are simply not enough organs donated to meet the need for transplants, with one person dying every day while waiting," he said. The number of people on the NHS donor register needed to treble to meet the growing demand. "I believe...

SAN LUIS OBISPO, California, July 6, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A California woman is filing a complaint in the San Luis Obispo County Superior Court against an organ transplant doctor and the Sierra Vista hospital for willfully deceiving her and murdering her physically handicapped son for the purpose of harvesting his organs. Mrs. Navarro is the mother and only surviving family of her son Ruben, who was stricken with Adrenal Leukodystrophy, a rare disorder that left him confined to a wheelchair. The court papers allege that last January, 26-year old Ruben was transferred to the Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center due...

The mother of a San Luis Obispo man who died after an attempted organ donation at Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center last year claims she never gave hospital officials consent to take her son off life-support and was misinformed when agreeing to the organ harvest, according to a wrongful death lawsuit. Rosa Navarro also alleges in her June 29 civil lawsuit that a transplant surgeon misrepresented himself as her son’s doctor, an allegation the surgeon’s attorney strongly denies. She also said she agreed to the organ donation only because she believed her son had no chance of survival. Defendants in...

Court Ruling Could Have Chilling Effect On Organ Donations SEATTLE -- If you marked "organ donation" on your driver's license, you may have given consent for something you can't imagine. Over the past year, KIRO Team 7 Investigators have repeatedly exposed how the King County Medical Examiner’s Office traded hundreds of human brains to a research lab, collecting $1.5 million along the way. Dozens of families say King County failed to get proper consent. Four sued. Now, Investigative Reporter Chris Halsne discovers a resulting court ruling might make everyone's donated body parts up for grabs. I, along with 2.6 million...

A cancer victim has accused his sister of condemning him to death by refusing to donate her bone marrow for a life-saving operation. Father-of-three Simon Pretty is likely to die from leukaemia within months unless he receives a transplant. His sister Helen, 43, is a perfect match but he says she has turned down the chance to save his life. Without the donation Mr Pretty – who has a rare tissue type – could be dead by the end of the year leaving his wife Jacqueline to raise their children Rebecca, eight, Jack, six and Benjamin, three. he human resources...

Both donor, recipient say although people feel religion a barrier to organ donation, saving lives is encouraged Reuters Published: 01.20.07, 19:15 When a New Jersey Methodist minister heard a local rabbi needed a kidney transplant, religious differences did not stop her from stepping forward to offer him one of her own. Rabbi Andrew Bossov is one of nearly 70,000 Americans currently awaiting a kidney transplant, and is set to receive a kidney from minister Karen Onesti on January 23., at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "I asked him how he was, he said he needed a...

Sigrid Fry-Revere is director of bioethics studies for the Cato Institute. Just last week, seven New York funeral home directors pleaded guilty to stealing organs from thousands of bodies, including that of broadcaster Alastair Cooke. Bizarrely enough, the federal government's looking to get in on the same action. At a meeting today and tomorrow, the Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation is expected to recommend that states adopt policies of "presumed consent" for organ donation. In other words, authorities could harvest organs from your dead body without prior permission from you or your family. If...

TORONTO, October 10, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A doctor and assistant professor in the faculty of medicine at the University of Calgary is warning that a change in the rules defining death for purposes of organ donations could place patients in danger and ICU doctors in a conflict of interest. Dr. Christopher Doig, director of the intensive care unit at Calgary's Foothills Medical Centre, wrote in an editorial in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that allowing organs to be removed from patients after cardiac arrest could place vulnerable patients at risk. Currently Canada relies upon the “brain death” criterion to...

ROME, September 15, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A new case-study raises more doubts about the ethical determination of “brain-death”, since researchers discovered that a patient suffering from a “persistent vegetative state” (PVS) demonstrated similar brain activity to healthy conscious individuals according to Zenit news. Under the leadership of neuroscientist Dr. Adrian Owen, the team of scientists from Cambridge University and the Belgian University of Liège applied MRI technology to discover that the brain activity of a PVS patient indicated she was “consciously aware of herself and her surroundings.” In their experiment, the researchers gave oral commands to a 23-year-old comatose Englishwoman,...

Close window Published online: 21 July 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060717-18 You're only as old as your genesGenetic fingerprint could pinpoint fittest organ donors.Helen Pearson Close up: ageing can be seen in our cells, chromosomes and genes.Credit: DR GOPAL MURTI / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A fingerprint of gene activity could reveal the true 'youthfulness' of our kidneys, hearts and muscle, regardless of our biological age. The technique might one day be used to find healthy organs for transplants or to warn us of impending disease. It's hard to tell, particularly on a cellular level, whether a young and healthy body conceals...

Womb transplants in humans should be possible within five years, say scientists in Sweden ... The procedure would allow women who have functioning ovaries but no womb to carry their own children, and the researchers say they have already been contacted by hundreds of women who are interested in having such a transplant. There are several reasons why a woman can lack a uterus. Some, with a condition called Rokitansky syndrome, are born without a vagina or a uterus. Others can lose their womb, for example through cervical cancer, or if the organ ruptures during childbirth. The only current way...

Joe Cash's dying wish was to donate his brain to science. His wife, Dee, is still upset it didn't happen. "It just seems," she said, "like something slipped through the cracks." Joe Cash, who lived in Sun City Texas in Georgetown, died April 6 at the age of 79, having suffered for seven years from a rare neurological disease called progressive supranuclear palsy. PSP gradually kills portions of the brain and causes blurred vision, difficulty swallowing and, eventually, death. There is no cure or treatment for the symptoms. Without donated brains there is virtually no way to find a cure,...