| ssaal 2004-10-22, 11:08 am |
| I found it ironic that the first recipient was an HMO executive.
The New York Times
October 21, 2004
Transplant Arranged via the Internet Is Completed
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
DENVER, Oct. 20 (AP) - Surgeons completed a kidney transplant Wednesday in
what is believed to be the first operation where the donor and recipient
met through a commercial Web site.
The donor and recipient were doing well after the four-hour surgery, a
spokeswoman for Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center said.
The recipient, Bob Hickey, who lives in a mountain town near Vail, had
needed a transplant since 1999 because of kidney disease but had tired of
being on the national waiting list. Mr. Hickey met the donor, Rob Smitty,
of Chattanooga, Tenn., through MatchingDonors.com, a Web site created in
January to match donors and patients for a fee.
"Sitting on a waiting list and hoping for a new kidney for so long, your
attention is attracted to anything that might help you," Mr. Hickey, 58, a
former executive at a health maintenance organization, said a few hours
before the operation.
The transplant had been scheduled for Monday, but doctors called it off at
the last moment to look into whether either Mr. Hickey or Mr. Smitty stood
to profit from the arrangement. Both men said no money changed hands for
the organ, which would violate federal law.
Ethicists said they still had concerns about MatchingDonors.com and other
organ donations between strangers. There are no laws against soliciting an
organ donation, and an increasing number of patients have turned to
friends and family, or even casual acquaintances, for kidneys and pieces
of liver.
By finding his own donor, Mr. Hickey bypassed the waiting list maintained
by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the nonprofit group that works
under government contract to allocate organs donated from the dead.
The network does not oversee the increasing number of live donors. Last
year, there were 6,920 living donors compared with 6,457 dead ones.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the university of Pennsylvania, said the
first ethical issue raised by Internet donations was financial. Not
everyone can afford to pay donor expenses or MatchingDonors.com's fees.
"Those who are better off are going to have access to people as potential
donors that the poor or the shy won't have," Mr. Caplan said.
MatchingDonors.com, based in Canton, Mass., charges varying fees to post
profiles of people looking for live organ donors. The company says that
all its profits go to maintain the site and that it often waives fees.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/n...l/21kidney.html
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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Sam Saal
ssaal@sonic.net
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