Word: livered
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Photographer Bryan Lee, 28, of Ottumwa, Iowa, entered a living nightmare last spring. His daughter Makenzie, 4, had developed liver cancer, and the only thing that could save her was a new liver. Since the demand for transplantable organs is always greater than the supply, Makenzie had gone on a waiting list--but high up, due to the severity of her condition...
...that the list would soon have to be rejiggered and that Makenzie would be dropping toward the bottom. Reason: the Federal Government was planning to institute a new system for organ allocation. Makenzie would have to compete for an organ with not only patients in her local area but liver patients all across the country as well. She might have been one of the sickest in Iowa, but in that larger population, she would have been considered relatively well off. Fortunately, Makenzie got her transplant last...
Sounds virtuous, but opponents of the rule say the equity argument is a smoke screen for a baser motive. They point out that transplants are down dramatically in big centers as smaller regional centers have proliferated. The University of Pittsburgh, for example, did 540 liver transplants in 1991, but only 200 last year. The cost per patient can be as high as $300,000. "You're talking millions and millions of dollars lost to those big transplant centers," says Iowa surgeon Maureen Martin...
...patients in limbo, adding uncertainty to the anguish they already suffer. Like Bryan Lee, Rita May Bolen has had enough. From her home in a New Orleans suburb, she calmly says her husband Leon, 71, is "sitting in a chair dying." They have been waiting 10 months for a liver. In August Leon was second in line for an organ that was about to become available, but it went to a sicker patient, a young father. "It's the fairest way," says Rita May. But watching the debate over regulatory changes--which could have the effect of prolonging their wait...
Another threat comes from man-made fertilizers, which wash off fields into streams and eventually into the ocean. This spurs the harmful overgrowth of algae and the spread of toxic microbes that can kill fish and cause human health problems, such as liver and kidney ills and amnesia. Billions of fish died along the Middle and Southern Atlantic coast in recent years because of suspected pollution from upstream sources. On a tour of the land area around Big Sur, my guide from the California Coastal Commission, Lee Otter (yes), noted as a caution and as a fact that "something always...