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from the you-put-your-left-leg-in,-your-left-leg-out... dept.
ScienceDaily reports:
Researchers say there should be an international database containing the very latest information about organ donations and transplants, so policy makers can make informed decisions on whether to adopt an opt-out or opt-in system.
The call comes after a study [in the UK], carried out by The University of Nottingham, the University of Stirling and Northumbria University, showed that overall an opt-out system might provide a greater number of organs for transplant but many factors can influence the success of either system and a repository of accessible information would help individual countries decide which one would be better for them.
The research published in the online academic journal BioMed Central Medicine (BMC Medicine), is the first international comparison that examines both deceased as well as living organ/transplant rates in opt-in and opt-out systems.
[...] Professor Fergusson argues that it is imperative for transplant organizations to routinely collect data on important organ donation indices -- consent type, procurement procedure, number of intensive care beds and trained surgeons -- and make this publicly available to inform future research and policy recommendations.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29 2014, @10:11PM
As a rule of thumb, it's generally best to let people opt-in to anything that could be harmful to them.
Having your organs harvested can be harmful, if not deadly. Somebody should have to opt in before having their organs harvested.
Having systemd installed on your Debian system is harmful. Somebody should have to opt in before having their system infected with awful software.
(Score: 2) by subs on Monday September 29 2014, @10:28PM
Having your organs harvested can be harmful, if not deadly.
Nobody's talking about an opt-in/out for living people. What are they gonna do? "Draft" you to donate organs, forcibly? Obviously at the point at which your organs are "harvested", the deadly part is already behind you. :D
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 29 2014, @10:45PM
You didn't think this through. Those harvesting your organs are often the same people who are deciding whether you live or die, often in a situation where you're incapable of making the choice yourself.
Let's say you get into a car accident. You've suffered mainly just head injuries, but the rest of your body is fine. You're still alive, but just barely, and you're unable to communicate. If they work hard, they could save your life. Or they could just wait a little while and let you die, and then harvest your organs.
Now, it would be nice to think that they'd try to save your life. But here they are, confronted with the costs and benefits of trying to save you, versus the costs and benefits of harvesting your organs.
You're just a single patient, who may not even be able to pay for the intensive care that you'll need in order to recover. Yet they can let you die with little cost to them, take your organs with little cost to them, and perform pricey (for the recipients!) transplants on several patients. If they save you, they make, say, $150,000. If they let you die and harvest your organs, they're looking at maybe $900,000 or more in income.
Interests start to conflict in this sort of a situation, especially when money plays as much of a role as it does in modern medicine.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2014, @07:56AM
It's worse than that. Organs need to be taken before you die, so no need to let you die. And there is no test that can determine for sure whether or not you are going to die.
We had a case recently here in Denmark, where the a young woman had opted in, but her parents said no because that meant they wouldn't get time to say goodbye. A few hours after the doctors were to take the organs, she started waking up. She was not happy when she learned how close she had come to become a donor.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday September 29 2014, @11:24PM
Actually, as I recall organs typically die within minutes of the body, at best. Add in the time it takes to remove them without damage and get them on ice, and if the doctor takes an extra 60 seconds trying to revive you it likely means that at least some of your organs will no longer be viable. Add in the fact that there is no bright clear line between being alive and dead - the doctor has to make a judgment call on each case individually - and you can see how being an organ donor might drastically reduce your chances of being revived in a touch-and-go situation. Does she keep trying to revive you at a 10% chance, knowing that doing so means your organs will no longer be suitable for transplant if she fails? And, oh yeah, even on ice those organs won't last long so they pretty much have to have the recipients for your organs lined up while you're still alive.
On the other hand given the tight time constraints it's actually very rare that a person dies under circumstances where their organs can be harvested - it's generally accepted that the ideal organ donor is someone who has experienced brain death but is otherwise still alive and healthy - the organs can then be either harvested en-masse, or one by one while keeping the body alive with prosthetics as a life-support system for the remaining organs, potentially greatly extending the window in which compatible recipients can be found.