The Butcher's Style

Harvesting Human Meat: The Butcher's Style.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646233272990474.html#mod=todays_us_nonsub_weekendjournal

"Harvesting human organs for sale! The idea suggests the lurid world of horror movies and 19th-century graverobbers. Yet right now, Singapore is preparing to pay donors as much as $50,000 for their organs. Iran has eliminated waiting lists for kidneys entirely by paying its citizens to donate. Israel is implementing a "no give, no take" system that puts people who opt out of the donor system at the bottom of the transplant waiting list should they ever need an organ."

Governments are going on a shopping spree - for human organs. Well, and also for a more noble purpose. To keep troubled needies from the agonizing purgatory of accessing the breathe of new life from an organ transplant, actions have been imposed to increase the availability of life-saving "raw supply" of organs.

And to the lesser know facts of surgical post-mortem, "To combat yet another shortfall, some American doctors are routinely removing pieces of tissue from deceased patients for transplant without their, or their families', prior consent. And the practice is perfectly legal". Ethical issue at hand: why aren't families given prior consent but instead dubious assurance that their deceased loved ones are, to put it simply, in one piece.

"In a number of U.S. states, medical examiners conducting autopsies may and do harvest corneas with little or no family notification." Such an unassuming statement towards the whereabouts of the harvest made - noble research, treatments, or personal pockets? The so called routine removal statutes, an evidence of pressurizing shortage of donated organs?

Organs can be taken from deceased donors only after they have been declared dead, but where is the line between life and death? Philosophers have been debating the dividing line between baldness and nonbaldness for over 2,000 years, so there is little hope that the dividing line between life and death will ever be agreed upon. Indeed, the great paradox of deceased donation is that we must draw the line between life and death precisely where we cannot be sure of the answer, because the line must lie where the donor is dead but the donor's organs are not.

Now, greater attention is being given to donation after cardiac death: no heart beat for two to five minutes (protocols differ) after the heart stops beating spontaneously. Both standards are controversial—the surgeon who performed the first heart transplant from a brain-dead donor in 1968 was threatened with prosecution, as have been some surgeons using donation after cardiac death. Despite the controversy, donation after cardiac death more than tripled between 2002 and 2006, when it accounted for about 8% of all deceased donors nationwide. In some regions, that figure is up to 20%.

Kidneys donated from people over the age of 60 or from people who had various medical problems are more likely to fail than organs from younger, healthier donors, but they are now being used under the pressure

Routine removal has been used for corneas but is unlikely to ever become standard for kidneys, livers or lungs. Nevertheless more countries are moving toward presumed consent. Under that standard, everyone is considered to be a potential organ donor unless they have affirmatively opted out, say, by signing a non-organ-donor card. Presumed consent is common in Europe and appears to raise donation rates modestly, especially when combined, as it is in Spain, with readily available transplant coordinators, trained organ-procurement specialists, round-the-clock laboratory facilities and other investments in transplant infrastructure.