FB Organ Donations Idea A Bust

I reported on this rather bizarre happening in May – trying to use Facebook to garner organ donors. Turns out it was quite a bust.

Facebook Organ Donation Scheme Fizzles

As many as 100,000 Facebook users worldwide signed up to be organ donors last May when the social network added a feature that allowed people to link to organ donation registries. But the number of new donors generated by the Facebook announcement trailed off rapidly, according to a recent commentary in the Bioethics Forum, the blog of the Hastings Center Report. more

FB And Organ Donation - Seriously??

There’s nothing particularly problematic with this story in and of itself. However, and you can trust me on this, it won’t be long before the pro-deathers hijack FB for their nihilistic ends.

Facebook encourages organ donation

The organ donation community applauded Facebook's announcement this week that it will allow its 900 million members to share their donor status with friends and family, and to link to state databases where Americans can sign up online to become donors. more

Ongoing Debate: When Is Dead Really Dead?

The push to redefine death goes on – all in favor of organ recipients and with little concern with what happens to the donors.

Donation after cardiac death: controversies with a controversy

There are few areas in bioethics which require more philosophical subtlety than determining when death happens in organ donation. But an NPR feature this week on the controversial problem of donation after cardiac death has highlighted an area which is even more controversial.

The dead donor rule – the golden rule of transplant surgeons -- is that vital organs may be taken only from patients who are unequivocally dead. Death is determined by the cessation of brain activity (brain death) or by the irreversible cessation of circulation and respiration (cardiac death). more

Deciding Who Gets Organs And Who Does Not

Here’s an interesting piece spinning off the recent furor at a Pennsylvania hospital which refused to consider a child with intellectual disabilities for a kidney transplant.

Outcry over disabled girl's transplant care renews eligibility debate

Physicians struggle to make the most of scarce organ resources. "You have to take a
A parent's anguished online plea for an organ transplant for her developmentally disabled daughter and new research on kidney transplantation eligibility among elderly patients have refocused attention on the vexing decisions that face physicians who determine which patients are suitable for transplantation. more

Children With Disabilities: Where Will The Discrimination End?

Here’s an interesting commentary on whether discrimination against people with disabilities will stop with denying them organ transplants.

Is Denial of Life-Saving Care for Mentally Disabled Girl a Sign of Things to Come?

When Joe and Chrissy Rivera sat down with a physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to talk about their child’s medical prognosis, the couple had no inkling they were about to become part of a heated national debate.

Their 3-year-old, Amelia, has a rare genetic disorder, Wolf Hirschhorn syndrome, a condition caused by missing chromosomal material. It causes mental disabilities and may include other birth defects. Amelia’s kidneys were failing, and she would need a kidney transplant sometime within the next year or so.

As described in a blog post by Chrissy Rivera, a high-school English teacher, the doctor, who is not named, placed two sheets of paper on the conference table last month, with words highlighted in pink: “mentally retarded” on one and “brain damage” on the other.

According to Rivera, Amelia was being denied a transplant because of her mental disabilities. more

Islam And Organ Transplantation

Here’s a very interesting piece reporting on a forthcoming book that focuses on Islamic cultural reponses to organ transplantation.

Q&A with Sherine Hamdy: Organ transplants, Islam and the struggle for human dignity in Egypt

Many accounts of Egypt’s black market organ trade have surfaced over the years when youths with shoddy scars would describe tales of amateur-performed organ transplants, executed for various tragic reasons, though usually revolving around money. Less documented, however, are the sociocultural characteristics surrounding issues of organ transplantation in Egypt that by extension allow for this phenomena to exist.

In her forthcoming book, titled “Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt,” scholar Sherine Hamdy, assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University, has, using over ten years of research, attempted to look at the deeper sociocultural issues surrounding organ transplantation in Egypt and why it remains such a controversial issue. more

Baby Boomers Ignore Advance Healthcare Directives

The fact that a lot of people don’t have advance directives will come home to roost when the boomers age just a little more than they are now. This will be especially true in relation to organ transplantation and organ harvesting.

End-of-life documents not a huge concern for many boomers, who say they still feel young

Many baby boomers don’t have end-of-life legal documents such as a living will — and some say it’s because they feel healthy and young in their middle-age years and don’t need to dwell on death.

An Associated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll found that 64 percent of boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — say they don’t have a health care proxy or living will. Those documents would guide medical decisions should a patient be unable to communicate with doctors. more