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Pope slams human organ trade, warns on transplants VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict condemned the trade in human organs as an abomination Friday and urged caution in removing organs for transplant from dying donors who might not actually yet be dead. The pontiff told scientists and bioethicists meeting at the Pontifical Academy for Life that the worldwide illegal organ trade often made victims of innocent people, including children. Buying and selling of human organs is a lucrative business for suppliers and countries that allow foreign "transplant tourists" to have operations they cannot get at home. Organs are often bought...

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...

An article published in the April 4th edition of Qi Lu Evening , a newspaper in Shandong Province in eastern China, has attracted people's attention and recently circulated throughout the Internet. It reported that a young man temporarily working in Jinan City decided to donate his corneas after a kidney failure diagnosis. However, several major hospitals throughout the area explained that they were "not qualified" to accept the donation. An official in the Ophthalmology Department of the Jinan Central Hospital even mentioned that none of the corneas used by his department came from donations. This report revisits the concern over...

April 14, 2008, 6:00 a.m. Code RedThe organ shortage is not something to play down. By Sally Satel & Benjamin Hippen A few weeks ago, the Washington Post broke the dramatic medical news that as many as one third of all people waiting for an organ transplant are actually ineligible to receive one. Could this mean that the shortage of kidneys, livers, hearts, and lungs is not as dire as we thought? Unfortunately, no. If anything, the fact that many patients are ineligible is a sign of urgency, not a reason to be complacent. According to the United Network...

Yesterday, the Mail told the extraordinary story of how a heart transplant recipient in America committed suicide - just like the man whose heart he had received 12 years previously. In another extraordinary twist, it emerged that the recipient had also married the donor's former wife. So can elements of a person's character - or even their soul - be transplanted along with a heart? One woman who believes this to be the case is CLAIRE SYLVIA, a divorced mother of one. She was 47 and dying from a disease called primary pulmonary hypertension when, in 1988, she had a...

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. (April 6) - A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. No foul play was suspected in 69-year-old Sonny Graham's death at his Vidalia, Ga., home, investigators said. He was found Tuesday in a utility building in his backyard with a single shotgun wound to the throat, said Greg Harvey, a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to...

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...

How liver surgeries cut short patients’ lives By The Tribune-Review Sunday, March 9, 2008 Hundreds of patients each year undergo liver transplants when they don't need them, and possibly never will, a four-month Pittsburgh Tribune-Review investigation found. One in 10 of those patients dies when they could have lived longer without the transplant. The rest - all at the rock-bottom of waiting lists - must resign themselves to an early battle with the burdensome risks of anti-rejection drugs and complications that can follow: infections, cancers, kidney damage, and high blood sugar. What's worse, a third of those patients get the...

The scandal involving kidney transplant kingpin Dr Amit Kumar is just the tip of an iceberg and there are many more bigger racketeers still operating across India, Aruna Th-Hollingshead, a leading agent of medical tourism has revealed. “Having been in the medical field for over 35 years, I can bet my life that Dr Kumar couldn’t hold a surgical knife. There is definitely a team of very experienced and highly skilled nephrologists who have transplanted these kidneys,” Aruna Th-Hollingshead told HT by phone from her Calgary-based office. Aruna, as she likes to be called, is also the North American representative...

Health authorities are setting clinical criteria on brain death to facilitate human organ transplants, a senior official said Wednesday. A panel of medical and ethical experts have been convened to define brain death and associated clinical rules, Mao Qun'an, spokesman for the Ministry of Health, revealed. "But it's still early to make legislation," Mao told a regular press conference, apparently contradicting recent media reports that a law on brain death is being framed. Huang Jiefu, vice-minister of health and a liver transplant specialist, earlier told the China Organ Transplant forum that the definition of brain death is key to legislation....

(LONDON) — Chinese medical officials agreed Friday not to transplant organs from prisoners or others in custody, except into members of their immediate families. The agreement was reached at a meeting of the World Medical Association in Copenhagen. China has previously acknowledged that kidneys, livers, corneas and other organs are routinely removed from prisoners sentenced to death row. But officials insist that this only happens when consent is provided. Critics argue that death-row prisoners are not truly free to consent and may feel compelled to become donors, violating personal, religious or cultural beliefs. The announcement Friday comes after several years...

After a long fight with a degenerative disease, Ruben Navarro appeared close to death. So the hospital caring for him alerted the local transplant network, which rushed a team to the medical center to try to salvage the 25-year-old's organs. But as Navarro hung on, tension mounted in the operating room of Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, Calif. With time slipping away, one of the transplant surgeons ordered repeated doses of the narcotic morphine and the sedative Ativan, jokingly calling the drugs "candy," according to police reports. Navarro eventually died, but too late for his organs...

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...

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...

On May 4, The Yangtze Evening News reported that China's most famous kidney expert, Dr. Li Baochun, had committed suicide by jumping from the twelfth floor of the Shanghai No. 2 Military Medical University Shanghai Hospital Building. Dr. Li had served as Deputy Director of the hospital and as Professor and Chief Physician for kidney disease. The report said Dr. Li's suicide was caused by depression. On May 24, The Yangtze Evening News report was reproduced on several major websites including the website of China's most important official media, www.xinhua.net. Further analysis revealed that the cause of Dr. Li's depression...

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...

China's Execution Buses Updated: 02:16, Thursday October 05, 2006 Sky News has obtained chilling new evidence of mobile execution buses being used by the Chinese government. It comes less than two years before China hosts the next Olympics - an event it was given after promising to improve its human rights record. China's penal system is surrounded by a wall of secrecy, but an investigation by Sky's China correspondent Dominic Waghorn found that between 3,500 and 10,000 people are put to death each year. The volume of executions has meant that China has invented new ways of killing, mobilizing and...

April 3, 2006 — The news is being hailed as a medical milestone: Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy. It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality. Dr. Anthony Atala, the director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, reports in tomorrow's issue of the medical journal The Lancet on the success of the new procedure, which was performed on children born with...

NO ORIGINAL TITLE These are some highlights from radio talk program 'Access Code' on radio station Echo of Moscow, regarding a recent spy scandal. Arkady Mamontov, a Russia version of Michael Moore (Mikhail Boloto?), recently made a documentary called 'Spies', which Echo of Moscow radio host Yuliya Latynina reviews and comments on, but first she mentions some of Mamontov's more notorious documentaties. I have a question that's even more global: why is this whole story, which should in theory be news, being given to us instead in the form of a movie? Or rather, in the form of a documentary,...

Imperfect Organs Offer Shorter Wait Time For Patients --- BOSTON -- Gloria Daise was stunned last year to learn that the wait for a transplant kidney averaged five to six years. But in April, a surgeon gave her another option: a shorter wait if she accepted a less-than-perfect organ. Transplant centers in New England and Michigan, where kidney shortages are acute, have been drawing up lists of volunteer recipients willing to use kidneys that come from donors who are older or have risk factors. Brigham and Women's Hospital, where Daise was seeking her transplant, has about 260 people on a...

VIENNA (Reuters) - Animal-to-human organ transplants could be at the dawn of a new era thanks to progress in overcoming rejection and the creation of transgenic pigs, an expert said Tuesday. Only about 25 percent of critically ill patients in need of a donor heart, kidney or liver receive the life-saving organs. Many die while waiting for a transplant. Xenotransplantation, the use of animal organs or tissue, is considered a possible solution to the worldwide shortage of donor organs. Professor Ian F.C. McKenzie, Australian president of the International Xenotransplantation Association (IXA), told a medical conference that scientists are making progress...

In what federal officials said was the first case of its kind, three people who received organ transplants in May from a single donor in Texas died from rabies in June. The donor was not suspected of having rabies at his death, which doctors attributed to a stroke, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said yesterday. It was not until this week, after a pathologist in Dallas who was puzzled about the deaths asked the federal agency for help, that the connection was made, Dr. Artun Srinivasan, a C.D.C. physician said in a telephone interview. Dr. Mitchell L. Cohen,...

The legacy of a mass murderer.A field outside Baghdad THE DEAD DON'T TALK in Iraq but their graves do. In northern Iraq, a grave was unearthed last July with several thousand bodies, mostly women and children. From the bullet holes in the top of the skulls, it was clear the deaths weren't natural. The victims had been shot from above while kneeling or after being forced into a mass grave. They had personal household items with them like baskets. They had their clothes on. These were clues that helped identify their hometown and led to the conclusion they'd been compelled...

<p>Once, it was considered a waste of a precious commodity: giving new livers, kidneys, and other organs to patients doomed by AIDS.</p> <p>But now, in one of the surest signs that the disease has been transformed from a death sentence into more of a chronic condition, select surgeons across the nation are transplanting organs into HIV patients -- and insurers are increasingly willing to pay. It is testament to a revolution in AIDS treatment as well as transplant medicine.</p>

Perhaps the culture of death my generation has unwittingly created will only come home to roost when, in our creaky 80s, we face the Futile Care Committee at our local hospital, to be told, well, it's simply too expensive to keep you alive any longer, buster. Inappropriate Care Protocols rule. Say your prayers, and your goodbyes, the lady with the "Aussie Exit Bag" is coming, next Tuesday at 11 o'clock. Death with Dignity. Good of the State. Here's the extension of the Therapeutic Grieving Committee. You can have whatever music you want. '70s? '80s? '60s? My, you are old. And...

The failure of footballer of George Best to refrain from drinking alcohol despite a life-saving liver transplant just 12 months ago has prompted questions about the merits of offering transplant surgery to alcoholics. Some say it is a waste of a precious and scarce resource, but others say there is no reason why people suffering from such a debilitating disease should be discriminated against. The George Best case may give the impression that people suffering from alcoholism take their place in the transplant queue like any other person with severe liver disease. In fact, this is not the case....