tagged w/ Organ Transplants
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Like a page from Larry Niven's Known Space series, here is a real report of criminals' organs being harvested for 'profit.' From the article: 'China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants. According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs. The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs. But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.Like a page from Larry Niven's Known Space series, here is a real report of criminals'... more
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China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of organs for transplants.
According to the China Daily newspaper, executed prisoners currently provide two-thirds of all transplant organs.
The government is now launching a voluntary donation scheme, which it hopes will also curb the illegal trafficking in organs.
But analysts say cultural bias against removing organs after death will make a voluntary scheme hard to implement.
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Human rights groups have often criticised China for its lack of transparency over organ donation, but critics have focused particular concern on the use of body parts from executed prisoners.
In a rare admission of the extent to which this takes place, China Daily - citing unnamed experts - said on Wednesday that more than 65% of organ donations come from death row prisoners.
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The China Daily quoted Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu as saying that condemned prisoners were "definitely not a proper source for organ transplants".
The new scheme is therefore designed to reduce the reliance on death row inmates, as well as regulating the industry by combating the illegal trafficking of organs.
The system will be piloted in 10 provinces and cities, and a fund will be started to provide financial aid to donors' families.China is trying to move away from the use of executed prisoners as the major source of... more
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A man has died of alcoholic liver failure at the age of just 22 despite a public appeal from his doctors for transplant rules to be waived to give him a chance at life.
Gary Reinbach and his family were told that unless he could prove that he could live alcohol-free in the community for six months he could not qualify for a donor organ - but he was too sick to leave hospital.
His doctors and his family went public at the weekend to highlight his plight, but Mr Reinbach died less than 48 hours after they issued their appeal for the rules to be waived.
Today, his mother Madeline Hanshaw, 44, expressed her bitterness that he had been denied a chance. She told the Evening Standard: “These rules are really unfair. I’m not saying you should give a transplant to someone who is in and out of hospital all the time and keeps damaging themselves, but just for people like Gary, who made a mistake and never got a second chance.”A man has died of alcoholic liver failure at the age of just 22 despite a public... more
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lvp
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added this
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4 months ago
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"Researcher working on a rare type of aortic abnormality found that the DNA from diseased tissue did not match the DNA from the blood of the same patients So far it's unclear whether these differences in the blood and aortic tissue are the consequence of RNA editing, which changes the messenger RNA but not the gene, or DNA editing, which involves differences in the gene itself. Based on the evidence so far, the researchers believe the differences resulted from developmental rather than somatic DNA alterations. 'Traditionally when we have looked for genetic risk factors for, say, heart disease, we have assumed that the blood will tell us what's happening in the tissue,' lead author Bruce Gottlieb said in a statement. 'It now seems this is simply not the case.'""Researcher working on a rare type of aortic abnormality found that the DNA from... more
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"Big news in the medical world: scientists in Australia have found a way to stop the body from attacking organ transplants, greatly decreasing the possibility of organ rejection.
Using a complex that contained a molecule known as interleukin-2, a molecule that promotes T cell proliferation, the researchers radically increased the number of Tregs in healthy mice before performing the transplants, effectively quieting the killer T cells. Webster explained what followed after the transplant: "The numbers of T regulatory cells dropped over time, and the immune systems returned to normal in about two weeks. By that time 80% of the mice had accepted the grafts of insulin producing cells as their own. This acceptance rate is very high for transplantation, with mice normally rejecting grafts within 2-3 weeks. A graft is considered accepted if it's tolerated after 100 days. We took some mice out to 200-300 days, and not one of them rejected."
This is fantastic news for the transplant world. If immune-suppressing drugs can be removed from the procedure, those receiving transplants could lead healthier, and undoubtedly longer, lives. Not to mention, cutting the drugs means cutting the cost of the procedure.""Big news in the medical world: scientists in Australia have found a way to stop the... more
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In late 2005, cardiac researcher Doris Taylor revived the dead. She rinsed rat hearts with detergent until the cells washed away and all that remained was a skeleton of tissue translucent as wax paper -- a ghost heart, as Taylor calls it. She injected the scaffold with fresh heart cells from newborn rats. Then she waited.
What she witnessed four days later, once the cells had a chance to make themselves at home, was astonishing. "We could see these little areas that were beginning to beat," says Taylor, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Cardiovascular Repair. "By eight days, we could see the whole heart beating. The first time that happened, it was like 'yes!'"
The experiment, which was reported this year in the journal Nature Medicine, marked a watershed moment: the first time scientists had created a functioning heart in the lab from biological tissue. For the 62 million people living with congestive heart failure, a condition in which the heart is no longer fit enough to pump blood through the body, drugs and heart-repair procedures frequently fall short; 60 percent of patients die within five years of diagnosis.
Popular Science articles
http://www.popsci.com/elizabeth-svoboda/article/2008-09/ghost-heart
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2008/product/recellularized-heartIn late 2005, cardiac researcher Doris Taylor revived the dead. She rinsed rat hearts... more
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A Colombian woman has received the world's first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown by seeding a donor organ with her own stem cells to prevent her body rejecting it, an international research team reported on Wednesday.
Transplanting other organs may be possible without drugs to dampen the immune system.A Colombian woman has received the world's first tailor-made trachea transplant, grown... more
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Three trends bode ill for our future: the increase in weather disasters, the black market in organs and the growing demand for drinking water.
This chart at the link above illustrates a staggering fact: The last 30 years have yielded four times as many weather-related disasters as the first three quarters of the 20th century combined. Tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods. You might say that the earth is throwing ominous tantrums.
Unfortunately, our reaction to such natural outbursts – as well as to the problems of skewed data on CO2 emissions, resource annihilation, and latent toxicity in our land and water – hasn’t spiked nearly as dramatically. Instead, we seem content to simply refine our existing patterns of consumption. If a mass-produced plastic label promises that a product is “green”, we’ll likely buy it and feel satisfied for having done our part.
We may owe our collective lack of environmental consciousness to the convenience of invisibility. We dispose of our waste in neat receptacles, rarely bearing witness to its grim deterioration. We marvel at the efficiency of the industrialized world yet seldom glimpse the colossal infrastructures that make such modern efficiencies possible.
But the taxing effects of the Western lifestyle are becoming more globally conspicuous than ever. And yet still, we’re largely unable to admit to the problem. Perhaps the world is experiencing a complex state of collective denial? Three trends bode ill for our future: the increase in weather disasters, the black... more
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jubal
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1 year ago
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When do you get to harvest someone else's organs?
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Pick up a recent issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, and you'll see the far edge of this tortured world. In the journal, doctors at Children's Hospital in Denver describe how they removed hearts from infants 75 seconds after they stopped. The infants were declared dead of heart failure, even as their hearts, in new bodies, resumed ticking.
Is this wrong? We like to think that moral lines are fixed and clear: My heart is mine, not yours, and you can't have it till I'm dead. But in medicine, lines move. "Dead" means irreversibly stopped, and stoppages are increasingly reversible. And when life support ends, says one bioethicist, "not using viable organs wastes precious life-saving resources" and "costs the lives of other babies." Failure to take body parts looks like lethal negligence.
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How can we get more organs? By redefining death. First we coined "brain death," which let us take organs from people on ventilators. Then we proposed organ retrieval even if non-conscious brain functions persisted. Now we have "donation after cardiac death," the rule applied in Denver, which permits harvesting based on heart, rather than brain, stoppage.
But stoppage is complicated. There's no "moment" of death. Some transplant surgeons wait five minutes after the last heartbeat; others wait two. The Denver team waited 75 seconds, reasoning that no heart is known to have self-restarted after 60 seconds. Why push the envelope? Because every second counts. Mark Boucek, the doctor who led the Denver team, says that waiting even 75 seconds makes organs less useful.
So how can death be declared based on irreversible heart stoppage when the plan is to restart that heart in a new body? Boucek offers two answers. First, even if the heart resumes pumping in a new body, it couldn't have done so in the old one. (That used to be true, but today, hearts can be restarted by external stimulation well after two or even five minutes.) Second, Boucek says the heart is dead because the baby's parents have decided not to permit resuscitation. In other words, each family decides when its loved one is dead. In a commentary attached to the Denver report, another ethicist proposes extending this idea -- letting each family decide not just whether to resuscitate but also at what point organs can be harvested. Brain death? Cardiac death? Persistent vegetative state? Death is whatever you say it is.
Modern medicine has brought us tremendous power. Boundaries such as death, heart stoppage and ownership of organs have guided our moral thinking because they seemed fixed in nature. Now we've unmoored them.
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you can read more...When do you get to harvest someone else's organs?... more
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seeviv
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1 year ago
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The man ended up marrying the heart donor's former wife -- but the article never states that as the possible reason by both the original heart's owner, and the new owner killed themselves. Coincidence?The man ended up marrying the heart donor's former wife -- but the article never... more
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A woman whose husband died after receiving a liver transplant infected with a rodent virus is suing PetSmart Inc., claiming the chain should have warned customers that hamsters can carry the virus.
The federal lawsuit alleges Thomas Magee, 54, and two other organ recipients died after transplants from a woman who had contracted a virus from a hamster she bought at a PetSmart store in Warwick, R.I.
A woman whose husband died after receiving a liver transplant infected with a rodent... more
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That's how you sell vacuum cleaners.
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kozeki
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added this
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2 years ago
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A teenage girl who recently discovered she has four kidneys is hoping to be able to donate two of them to patients desperately in need of a transplant. Laura Moon, 18, from Leeds, is one of a tiny number of people to have four of the organs growing naturally. She only became aware of her unusual anatomy six months ago after undergoing an ultrasound scan to investigate stomach pains following a car crash. 'I realised that the doctor scanning me hadn't said anything for a long time. I thought he was going to give me bad news. But then he said: "You've got four kidneys." He measured them and I have two which are 14cm and two which are 9cm'. She has voiced interest in donating the two spares to someone who needs them.A teenage girl who recently discovered she has four kidneys is hoping to be able to... more
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"The alleged mastermind of a kidney transplant scheme in India has admitted to his involvement in about 300 transplants over the last 12 to 13 years, police said Friday....Amit Kumar is accused of coercing, stealing or buying kidneys from healthy Indians and then selling them to foreigners for transplant.....Police in India have said that as many as 500 people may have each lost a kidney to the ring. Some told CNN they were forced to do so and not compensated."
This guy had over $250,000 in mixed currency on him and he had the nerve to declare his innocence.
I find it ironic that this happens, while I'm in the middle of reading Michael Crichton's book, NEXT. It's mostly about the world of genetics, but it touches on illegal harvesting of body parts.
http://www.crichton-official.com/books-next-history.html"The alleged mastermind of a kidney transplant scheme in India has admitted to his... more
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Oh Hell No!!!
A nurse admitted Wednesday he cut body parts from 244 corpses and helped forge paperwork so the parts, some of them diseased, could be used in unsuspecting patients.
Authorities say nurse Lee Cruceta was the lead cutter in a group that trafficked in more than 1,000 stolen body parts for the lucrative transplant market.
He pleaded guilty to conspiracy, taking part in a corrupt organization, abuse of a corpse and 244 counts each of theft and forgery. Cruceta, 35, also has pleaded guilty to related charges in New York and negotiated pleas to serve concurrent sentences of 6 1/2 to 20 yearsOh Hell No!!!
A nurse admitted Wednesday he cut body parts from 244 corpses and... more
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A global network of spies, deception and political pressure must be overcome to prevent the further suffering of innocence. Some Truths Are Intolerable is a short film about the persecution of Falun Dafa (a peaceful spiritual practice from China), at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). From 1992-1999 Falun Dafa was freely followed throughout China, until the government decided that there were too many people studying the energy exercises and meditation. The CCP banned the practice and immediately declared up to 100million innocent people as being criminals. Since then, thousands have been tortured to death for their beliefs, hundreds of thousands are in slave labour camps, and millions have had their lives ruined by their own government. It is the intention of What Is Tough (a project dedicated to releasing a feature film about this issue) to bring to the public's attention this global disaster, before the Olympic Games are held in Beijing, in August of 2008. The atrocities covered in the film continue to this day.
Please visit www.whatistough.com for more information on the project and please sign-up to Current TV to vote for this film, so that more people become aware of the truth about Falun Dafa, because some truths are intolerable!
Thank you.
A global network of spies, deception and political pressure must be overcome to... more
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Calls for a revolution in the way post-death organ donations are handled are picking up speed, with the Observer newspaper today launching a campaign for a sea change in the law. With government ministers joining in with the calls for a system of 'presumed consent', it's looking likely that a meaningful attempt to tackle the unnecessary deaths caused by the acute shortage of donors in the UK will be put in place soon.Calls for a revolution in the way post-death organ donations are handled are picking... more
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An organ donor infected 4 transplant patients with the AIDS virus, the first infection from a transplant in 13 years.
The initial tests on the donor for HIV and Hepatitis (which the patients were also infected with) came back negative. However, the donor was probably infected with the virus in the last three weeks before his death.
Kind of ironic.
Yet another reason to wrap it up and get tested, especially if you plan to donate. An organ donor infected 4 transplant patients with the AIDS virus, the first infection... more
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With the help of a Blackberry, a pager, a computer and a complicated system called "Donornet," Travis Watson coordinates the intricate exchange between organ donors and their recipients, including Amy, 26, who's receiving a kidney from her 24 year-old boyfriend Michael.With the help of a Blackberry, a pager, a computer and a complicated system called... more
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Singer and actor Robert Goulet is heavily sedated and breathing through a respirator in a Los Angeles hospital while he awaits a lung transplant, his wife told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "He can hear me but he can't respond," Vera Goulet said of the 73-year-old crooner.
Sad...I kind of love him.Singer and actor Robert Goulet is heavily sedated and breathing through a respirator... more
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