Talk:Organ donation

The first section in the article needs to be more about who does organ donations and the procedures involved.

Unsubstantiated claim

When reading the part about the organ short fall, the claim of: "Three-quarters of patients in need of an organ transplant are waiting for a kidney, and more than half of them die before a matching organ becomes available." The second half of that sentence was linked to http://www.ustransplant.org/annual_reports/current/105_dh.htm and unfortunately, I am unable to find that statistic anywhere on that page. Indeed, the data doesn't even hint that that occurs. So I'm taking out the claim that half of them die because it is unsubstantiated and I can't find that statistic anywhere else. Minnyhaha (talk) 21:50, 14 April 2008 (UTC) I think that this is a mis-statement based on two different ideas. First is that 18 people die each day - the second is that half of the 18 people (actually very near 48%) that die are awaiting kidneys. This makes sense as there are so many more kidney patients than any other organ. Good call to pull it. It is not factual.

Organ robbery

There should be some mention of organ robbery even if to dismiss it. I see in the history that:

Rumors and legends about "theft" of organs, though, are generally apocryphal.

was removed. Wikipedia should have some information about this, especially the non-apocryphal cases if any.

I am pretty curtain this is an urban legend, so I checked the regular sites:

• Snopes What's the market for spare body parts?: "In addition to renewable resources such as blood, milk, sperm, etc., ... the stuff you can spare that somebody else theoretically could use includes kidneys, bone marrow, liver slices, the odd bit of lung, and corneas."
• Hoaxbusters: "Kidney Harvest" myth

Feel free to work this back into the article.

Strangely enough, this article claims that it has happened in India. I wonder how this story will turn out when more is known? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:13, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Donation by Executed People

I think the case of Gregory Scott Johnson should be used as a start on a section about the ethics and law on donation by executed people. Spalding 22:11, May 29, 2005 (UTC)

Another case was Jonathan Nobles. He wanted to donate a portion of his liver, but was denied because the lethal injection chemicals damage and contaminate most of the body. [1] --Kevin L'Huillier 18:38, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

too much issues

This only talks about issues and controversy in most places. It just blabs about criticism and it doesn't even say the basics like if a heart can be transplanted. I am dissappointed in this article.

How unfortunate. But please realise that an article is only as good as the work of the various contributors who have been willing to share their knowledge and experience. You are welcome to add whatever research you do to this article, so further visitors will not face the same disappointment. JFW | T@lk 10:00, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

This article is about organ donation. The article about actual transplantaion can be found at Organ transplant. -- kenb215 talk 04:39, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

Not quite

"Issues surrounding patient autonomy, living wills, and guardianship make it nearly impossible for involuntary organ donation to occur."

This sentence is factually untrue. In Hungary (member of EU and NATO) written law says they can take the organs of a brain-dead person without relative's consent, unless the deceased had ever sent a "non-donor" card to the state authority. However, after one such of untold organ removal case relatives beat up a doctor with baseball bats extremely badly. Since then no hospital dares to take organs without relatives' consent, de facto overruling the written law. 195.70.32.136 17:43, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Userbox

If you're a registered organ donor, please feel free to add Template:User organ donor to your userpage. Radagast 02:48, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Someone deleted the template without leaving a redirect, breaking lots of user-pages. I added a redirect, but you should really use {{User:Disavian/Userboxes/Organ Donor}} , which looks identical. --BarkerJr 01:26, 12 August 2006 (UTC)

MAJOR BREAKTHROUGH

The scope of this new breakthrough is simply breathtaking (not the caps locks above). To see it (and to taking too much space on the talk page) go to [[2]]. "The capacity to create organs has huge ramifications for the thousands of people worldwide whose survival depends on transplants - especially heart patients," Professor Morrison, a professor from the Bernard O'Brien Institute of Microsurgery, said today (8/6/06) -- Josh 06:52, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Organ Donation and Driver's Licenses

If I knew the laws on organ donation and driver's licenses, I would edit the page and mention them, but as it is, I don't even know whether there are national laws in the US or if they vary from state to state. Are organ donor cards explicitly offered with driver's licenses, or are they just an option that you can go out of your way to get? Maybe I'm asking this page to run before it can walk, but I think it would be very helpful if anyone who had the time could find certifiable information on this.

-Bertoffski

For California, the organ donor card comes with the driver license. All the donor has to do is affix a pink donor sticker on his or her license to be a organ donor. I'm not sure how it works in other states.
The page (or a new page) should probably mention something about the hoax that having a donor sticker on your drivers license will cause the Paramedics to allow you to die in order to harvest your organs. I was shocked when I first heard this and I know this is completely untrue. Jumping cheese ^Cont@ct 07:02, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Financial aspect

You don't seem to talk about financial aspect of organ donation in the US. I'm french, so I do not have a lot of knowledge about this topic in the United States... What does the law say about financial remuneration in return for a donation? In France, the human organs or "products" (blood, exudes...) are unsaleable. The organ donation is an anonymous and free act. We cannot know who is the donor.

Financial compensation for organ donation in the US is illegal. Instead, there's a national waitlist that gets updated by computer each time an organ is made available. Some individuals with enough money can bribe doctors to bypass the list. As far as I know, donors cannot choose the recipients. Of course, if someone chooses to be a living donor, their organ generally goes to whoever they designate (family member, friend, etc). MlleDiderot 14:31, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

What was the original rational for making compensation illegal? When were laws banning compensation put into effect? There has been a lot of talk in the Wall Street Journal recently about changing the laws so that US organ donors can be paid. The push seems to be coming from the transplant industry. Eperotao 17:17, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

The rationale is that the deceased and/or the deceased's family might be motivated to donate dangerous organs just to get the money. The physicians which handle transplants may not know anything about the patient except "There was a bad motorcycle wreck." In the face of even a few hundred dollars, some families might not choose to reveal that the deceased person had HIV, or cancer, or whatever -- and you'd hate to kill the recipient. 70.137.146.71 00:02, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually your statement about HIV, or cancer is incorrect. All donors go through a screening process in which lab tests are run. HIV 1&2, HLTV, RPR (Syphilis), Hep B surface antigen, Hep B core, Hep C. Yes, someone organs are transplanted that have HIV or Hepatitis but they are only transplanted to a person with the same. (71.201.115.60 09:19, 6 July 2007 (UTC))

Here is the UNOS statement for the U.S. at this time: "A handful of medical conditions will rule out organ donation, such as HIV-positive status, actively spreading cancer (except for primary brain tumors that have not spread beyond the brain stem), or certain severe, current infections."[3] This tends to contradict the previous writer's unsourced assertion.

PHP at UCSF (and other places) has done excellent work with organ transplants into HIV+ people. The problem isn't that it can't be done, but that financial incentives might limit the information you have. The fact remains that there are no quick and wholly reliable tests for dozens and dozens of types of neoplastic disease. You don't want to push family members into saying "Show me the money" when the recipient's life depends on them saying, "Didn't you know he just achieved remission last month for his leukemia?" WhatamIdoing 17:04, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

Spanish law

Under Spanish law, every corpse can provide organs unless the deceased person expressly rejected it. Nonetheless, doctors ask the family for permission, making it very similar in practice to the United States system.

Ok, Spanish doctors might well ask relatives for their "permission" to have organs donated, but they a. don't need this permission and b. are bound by law to use a dead person's organs for transplanation if they are suitable regardless of the relatives' permission. Therefore the Spanish system is nothing but similar to the United States system. Themanwithoutapast 21:59, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

If you have a source for your second point, I'd love to see it. I was about to start work on a Spanish transplant article, and that would be very useful. By the way, the edits adding references for the spanish section are mine. I forgot to log in. Verloren Hoop 21:46, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

The BBC supports the idea that relatives can refuse consent but doesn't mention the legal issues [4] Nil Einne 16:10, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Contradiction

This article contradicts the Pancreas transplantation article in that this article states that partial pancreas transplants can take place from a living person, and the Pancreas transplantation article explicitly states that one cannot live without their pancreas, and that donation is from someone who just died. --BsayUSD [Talk] [contribs] 17:19, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I think the key word is "partial". Under Pancreas transplantation#History, the article says that in "1979 the first living-related partial pancreas transplantation was done." --Kyoko 19:48, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

I clarified the pancrease transplantation article to make it clear in the intro a partial transplant was possible and removed the contradict tag as it was not true Nil Einne 16:15, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Cloning

This sounds like it was written by the typical commentator that has no idea what they're talking about

Further, the use of cloning to produce organs with an identical genotype to the recipient has issues all its own. Cloning is still a controversial topic, more so when the clone is created with the express purpose of being destroyed for harvesting.[citation needed] While the benefit of such a cloned organ is a zero-percent chance of transplant rejection, the ethical issues involved with creating and killing a clone may outweigh these benefits.

What is it trying to talk about? I've never seen anyone seriously suggest we clone human to harvest organs. Other then the fact this won't be particularly successful (since you need to wait many years for the organs to be of a suitable size, only people who don't understand cloning talk about clones as if they're not unique individuals. A fully cloned human is a unique individual. If on the other hand it's talking about some sort of organ cloning (which is a field with only limited success) then this is rather different and if you're cloning an organ, it's an organ, not a clone. And you're not going to kill the cloned organ because that would defeat the purpose. Cloning is indeed controversial but if we're going to discuss it we need to at least make sense Nil Einne 16:28, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Trade and financial exploitation

The article mentions the trade and financial exploitation arguments but surprisingly fails to mention the issue of middlemen and how it's sometimes claimed that they make most of the money. I might add it myself but I'm lazy to look for references Nil Einne 16:51, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Down 40% Because of Horror Movie

In the board game "urban myth" it states that organ donation went down 40% in the US because of a horror movie that showed people being killed for their organs. It also stated that this was not a myth, but true. I don't know what the movie's title was. Should this be stated in the article?

Lukewarm and proud,

LOOKIE MILK! (talk) 20:19, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

It's not verifiable, so it shouldn't be included. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:55, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Organ trade and organ donation

Article should be split to expand the article organ trade. This is needed as several ethical, legal and illegal issues are being mixed in the article, giving somewhat a negative aspect to the word "donation". Kindly comment what could be done? --STTW (talk) 14:49, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Table

I've been working on a table for wait list sizes. You can see it at User:WhatamIdoing/Sandbox (for now, at least). There are a few blanks that need to be filled in. Also, it would be nice to also list these numbers by "people waiting per million" to account for the substantial differences in population size. France provides these numbers pre-calculated at the listed source, and the missing Spanish numbers are missing because they're only given this way.

I've thought about flipping the orientation (organs across, and countries down), because it would make it easier to expand, but doing that by hand is a lot of tedious work.

Please feel free to insert the missing numbers directly into the draft. If you have thoughts or comments, please leave them on this page (so everyone will see them). Thanks, WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:33, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Legislation

The legislative framework section has a vast amount of unsubstantiated claims. To draw one example, there is a claim that countries with opt out systems have no waiting lists. This has no source, and I have read items that refute this claim. It needs a great deal of fixing/pruning in my opinion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.10.103.34 (talk) 02:51, 3 July 2008 (UTC)

Scandals

Just wondering whether the paragraph talking about doctors screening a person's organs before his/her death is actually a scandal or just a policy. On the other hand, that paragraph seems to be based on the Spanish case while the reference use (29) doesn't mention Spain at all. --Abraham (talk) 18:00, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

It looks misplaced. Perhaps it belongs to the previous section? Feel free to move it to a place that you think is best. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:06, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Ok, moved! I also removed the references, I don't think they were related to the topic (maybe the original author meant to include a different one?). --Abraham (talk) 16:08, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

The refs support the statements made and should be replaced. See

In some cases, OPO representatives request tests, such as HIV screening, of a patient without obtaining family members' consent, or ask doctors to administer blood pressure drugs or other medication to keep a possible donor's organs viable until their suitability can be determined and the family consent can be obtained.

and

Most hospitals now have detailed criteria that automatically trigger a call to the local OPO within the first hour after a potential donor is identified.

The only think this article doesn't mention is that this happens in Spain. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:33, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Well, I guess it's a matter of interpretation. The article does say "Most hospitals [...]" and so, but doesn't mention which country's hospitals; every stated example is located in the US (Sierra Vista Regional Medical Center in San Luis Obispo, Calif., University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Meriter Hospital in Madison, Wis., just to mention some) and the publisher is also american (The Washington Post), which altogether suggests the article is talking specifically about the US system. That doesn't support a statement like particularly in countries with an integrated and proactive organ network, like Spain so either should it be rephrased or reference not used. --Abraham (talk) 11:22, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I've restored the text, without mentioning Spain (although I'd be surprised if the Spanish system, or any halfway decent system, didn't do whatever was reasonably useful and had no risk of any harm to the dying patient). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:58, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree, I'll try to look for some references which demonstrate these practices are held in Spain (can't promise anything though). --Abraham (talk) 12:32, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

External links

User:Ombudsman has recently insisted upon the inclusion of an external link to Donate Life America. This is presumably of no value (or remarkably little value) to any person outside the United States.

• No page should be linked from a Wikipedia article unless its inclusion is justifiable.
• ...one should avoid: 1. Any site that does not provide a unique resource beyond what the article would contain if it became a Featured article.

I invite Ombudsman to list his/her justifications for including another US-specific website, and to identify the unique resources that this website makes available to all of our readers (not just the US readers). WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

WHO Observatory

I suggest adding this WHO site, based in the Spanish ONT, to the external links: http://www.transplant-observatory.org This Council of Europe newsletter on the site has data for 2007, more eup-to-date than those cited: http://www.transplant-observatory.org/C5/News%20ONT/Document%20Library/newsletter2008.pdf Note also that the Spaniards deny that presumed consent is responsible for their high donor rate. In a downloadable survey document (http://elmodeloespanol.ont.es/modeloespanol.pdf) they state that in practice family consent is required. They put their high donor rate down to better organization, and in particular having a trained doctor within each hospital ICU as part-time transplant coordinator.

--JamesWim (talk) 22:34, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

You know, the best possible thing to do would be for you to put that information directly into the article, using that link as a <ref>proper reference</ref>. Then the reader would actually get an accurate understanding of the situation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:24, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Facts and Figures

This link [5] has some facts and figures in it at the bottom that you might want to add to the article. - ARC Gritt^TALK 01:23, 4 February 2009 (UTC)