Bad Organ Donations

Regardless of financial situation, each person has extremely valuable assets which can be transferred at death, namely the person’s own body and its parts. Doctors perform over 20,000 organ transplants in the United States every year.  Despite the media attention given to organ donation, organs are in short supply.  Over 88,000 people were waiting for organ transplants.

In an attempt to satisfy this overwhelming demand, there is a risk that low quality organs will be used reminiscent of Fritz giving Dr. Frankenstein a dysfunctio cerebri after dropping a good brain on the floor.

This problem receives extensive treatment in Gretchen Reynolds, Will Any Organ Do?, NY Times, July 10, 2005.  Here is the introductory paragraph of this very interesting article:

Last summer at one hospital in Dallas, four people died from rabies, an unheard-of level of incidence of this rare disease. As it turned out, each patient was infected by an organ or tissue — a kidney, a liver, an artery — that he or she received in a transplant several weeks earlier. Their shared donor, William Beed Jr., a young brain-dead man, had rabies, caught apparently through a bite from a rabid bat, something the surgeons never suspected. They all thought he had suffered a fatal crack-cocaine overdose, which can produce symptoms similar to those of rabies. ”We had an explanation for his condition,” says Dr. Goran Klintmalm, a surgeon who oversees transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center, where the transplants occurred. ”He’d recently smoked crack cocaine. He’d hemorrhaged around the brain. He’d died. That was all we needed to know.”