Prison Blocks Inmate from Donating Organ

New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that Stephen Stage, 53, convicted of aggravated battery, wants to give his kidney to a woman whose plight he read about in the paper. The Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office, which runs the prison, says no.

Even though Medicaid, Wiltz's insurer, would cover all medical fees, including a blood test to determine whether she could receive Stage's kidney, Inglese said transferring deputy sheriffs to a hospital to guard Stage around the clock would be a drain on the department's already tight budget and leave the prison vulnerable.

That money "is the taxpayers' money," he said. "The Orleans Parish Criminal Sheriff's Office doesn't have the right to donate that money so someone can have a kidney transplant. . . . We need the money for people in the jail to receive health care, not people in the community."

- Arthur Caplan

Ads to Get a Liver Condemned by UNOS

Houston Chronicle and Richmond Times Dispatch report on the UNOS decision to recommend that transplant programs refuse to transplant organs where solicitation for those organs has been performed. The recommendation is just that, and there was no modification of official policy of UNOS, so hospitals are free to ignore UNOS on this matter. The Houston hospital where the pivotal case under discussion occurred has already planned to review its policies:

Todd Krampitz garnered national attention last summer when he advertised for a new liver on two Houston billboards and a Web site. Doctors had diagnosed the 32-year-old Houston man's severe liver cancer in May, and he was deemed too sick to be placed on donor lists. A week after going public, Krampitz received an organ from an out-of-state family who had heard of his plight. The operation was performed at The Methodist Hospital.

Sherril Lanthier, director of the Multiorgan Transplant Center at The Methodist Hospital, said the hospital will review the new recommendation announced late Friday. "We look at everything that comes from UNOS and we follow their guidelines," Lanthier said. "We will look at it ourselves and make a policy within the hospital." But she added: "We can't control what our patients do. We certainly don't advocate it."

After Krampitz's surgery, he and his wife, Julie, put up another billboard saying "Thank You," and encouraged more people to consider organ donation. After their successful appeal, others in need of organs used similar campaigns.

The nearly unanimous vote Thursday by UNOS officially condemned soliciting organ donations through advertising.

Dying to Live

Major new series on organ tranplant issues. Not to be missed. - Art Caplan

What's Up Roundup

Not enough organs in Scotland, and fewer are going to be available.

More about how the world will end, or at least it will feel like that in Wisconsin, if the state doesn't kick up its stem cell spending.

Wisconsin should be more worried about New Jersey, whose new acting governor is going to be asking voters to approve borrowing "hundreds of millions of dollars" to fund embryonic stem cell research.New Jersey's last governor, in early retirement, is being eulogized all over the place for his role in advancing stem cell research there.

A new novel from Jodi Picoult examines purposeful birth for organ donation and Courtney Devores likes it. AJOB will have a review; anybody want to do it?

Seattle PI discusses moral surprise in the election.

Go figure that fewer people want hormone replacement therapy after a study showed that they might harm women. Who would have guessed?

I love this piece in OregonLive about the Seventh-day Adventists' role in Operation Whitecoat, the long-running biologic research program between 1954 and 1973. The courage of these who were exposed to all sorts of horrific germs is interesting. Moreno is quoted.

I love university fluff about professorial accomplishments, because it means that the university recognizes that it actually has a faculty. Here's a nice piece about Bob Levine's appointment to the CDC vaccine task force.

Speaking of university press, this short one by a Princeton undergrad looks at Peter Singers' class' visit to a NICU. Singer visits a NICU. What does he say in his ethics consults??

Leave it to an evangelical to coin a new bioethics term: the bioethics porkfest.

A Tax Break for Organ Donors?

From Christian Science Monitor.