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It might sound a little disturbing to some people but a new pilot program will attempt to recover kidneys from people who die at home in Manhattan. A team of organ specialists will have about 20-minutes after a cardiac-arrest patient is declared dead to arrive at the home, check a donor registry, determine medical eligibility, obtain a family member's consent and get the person into a specialized ambulance. A special team will monitor 9-1-1 calls about people in danger of dying and they will travel directly to a person's home without being summoned. The program is being launched Wednesday. It...

Johnny Concepcion, a 42-year-old man accused of stabbing his wife to death, just received a liver transplant at New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center in New York. Now many are wondering how an accused killer could jump to the top of a long list of those needing transplants. Concepcion has reportedly confessed to friends and relatives that he killed his wife, Jordania Sarita. Earlier this month, police found the 36-year-old woman stabbed at least 15 times in the home she had shared with her husband and their three children for 18 years. The two had recently separated. After the murder, Concepcion...

...lately, I have discovered that I, like the public at large, have been completely misinformed as to what really goes on when organs are donated.

By MICHAEL GORMLEY Associated Press Writer ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - A New York assemblyman whose daughter is alive because of two kidney transplants wants his state to become the first in the nation to pass laws that would presume people want to donate their organs unless they specifically say otherwise. Assemblyman Richard Brodsky believes the "presumed consent" measures would help combat a rising demand for healthy organs by patients forced to wait a year or more for transplants. Twenty-four European countries already have such laws in place, he said. If he succeeds, distraught families would no longer be able to...

Organs 'Removed For Transplant Without Consent' It is illegal to take organs without consent. Organs may have been removed from deceased people without their consent after a data-handling error by the NHS. The blunder meant 800,000 people on the UK donor register had their wishes about the use of organs for transplant after death wrongly recorded. The Sunday Telegraph reported that 45 of them have now died - and 20 families let organs of relatives be taken based on incorrectly stored information. NHS Blood and Transplant said it was urgently investigating. Many donors give consent for some organs to be...

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...