Word: donor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There will never be enough cadaver organs to fill the growing needs of people dying from organ or tissue failure. This places higher and higher importance, and risk, on living relatives who might serve as donors. Organs that are either redundant (one of a pair of kidneys) or regenerative (bone marrow) become more and more attractive. Transplants become a matter of high- stakes risk-calculation for the donor as well as the recipient, and the intense emotions involved sometimes have people playing long shots...
...more and more pressed to provide organs to save relatives. It is a bizarre request, of course, difficult to refuse, and can lead to ugly family conflicts. As Alexander Capron, a bioethicist at the University of Southern California, says, "a good medical team knows how to help a potential donor to say no." Often, doctors simply lie and say that the relative who does not want to do it is "not a match...
...Currys didn't waste time searching for bone-marrow donors outside the family. Instead, Lea Ann got pregnant. When that fetus miscarried, Lea Ann waited a month, then got pregnant again. The couple gained a healthy baby, Audrey, but she was an unsuitable donor. Within 12 weeks, Lea Ann was again pregnant, this time with Emily, whose tissue proved compatible. So doctors collected and stored the blood from Emily's umbilical cord -- blood rich in stem cells. Twenty months after Emily's birth, the cord blood was transplanted into her sister, then...
...operation. Today, more than eight out of 10 heart recipients live at least a year with their borrowed organs. For kidney transplants, first-year survival tops 90%. As success rates soar, doctors attempt ever more variations on the transplant theme: installing a new pancreas, lobes of a live donor's lungs, even several organs at once. But rising hopes mean more people will be disappointed. Some 23,000 Americans desperately await replacement organs this year; if current shortages continue, more than 2,000 of them will die before a donor is found...
...India, the going rate for a kidney from a live donor is $1,500; for a cornea, $4,000; for a patch of skin, $50. Two centers of the thriving kidney trade are Bombay, where private clinics cater to Indians and a foreign clientele dominated by wealthy Arabs, and Madras, a center for patients from Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Renal patients in India and Pakistan who cannot find a relative to donate a kidney are permitted to buy newspaper advertisements offering living donors up to $4,300 for the organ. Mohammad Aqeel, a poor Karachi tailor who recently sold...