Word: organisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sent packing. While it's true that hospitals expect to be reimbursed for services provided to even the neediest and most grievously ill patients, it's not true that they handle things in so mercenary a manner. "That's Hollywood," says Anne Paschke, spokeswoman for the United Network for Organ Sharing. "The fact is, there are a lot of things that would prevent that from happening in the real world...
...even know? These people are called heroes, not victims, and no one debates the ethics of what they do. A larger question, however, is why this dilemma exists in the first place. If enough of us would sign our donor cards and tell our families we want to be organ donors, living donors wouldn't be necessary. PHYLLIS M. GEORGE Clinton, Tenn...
Indeed, a recent survey showed that most people will accept a mortality rate for living organ donors as high as 20%. The odds, thankfully, aren't nearly that bad. For kidney donors, for example, the risk ranges from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 4,000 for a healthy volunteer. That helps explain why nearly 40% of kidney transplants in the U.S. come from living donors...
...operation to transplant a liver, however, is a lot trickier than one to transplant a kidney. Not only is the liver packed with blood vessels, but it also makes lots of proteins that need to be produced in the right ratios for the body to survive. When organs from the recently deceased are used, the surgeon gets to pick which part of the donated liver looks the best--and to take as much of it as needed. Assuming all goes well, a healthy liver can grow back whatever portion of the organ is missing, sometimes within a month...
...living-donor transplant works particularly well when an adult donates a modest portion of the liver to a child. Usually only the left lobe of the organ is required, leading to a mortality rate for living donors in the neighborhood of 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000. But when the recipient is another adult, as much as 60% of the donor's liver has to be removed. "There really is very little margin for error," says Dr. Fung. By way of analogy, he suggests, think of a tree. "An adult-to-child living-donor transplant is like cutting...