Medical experts raise flak over transplant policies
8:57 a.m. Monday, March 24, 2008
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A new study that finds one third of the people waiting on transplant lists are actually ineligible to receive the organs.
Orazio Cirelli's 11-year-old daughter Lia is fighting for her life after being diagnosed this week with acute liver failure. Now, she's desperate for a transplant. "It came on very sudden," he said. "It's such a short time period that she has before it gets terminally worse."
Lia now joins about 98,000 people in need of an organ donation.
And while her condition is new, there are thousands, according to a new report, who remain languishing on the transplant list -- ineligible for an organ either because they are too sick or not sick enough.
"It's unfair. It's simply unacceptable. You got people waiting who deserve better than to be stuck on an inactive list. And it's deceptive. You can't have a one-third of the list out there that doesn't really belong," said Center for Bioethics Director Arthur L. Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
In fact, some medical experts say the group that oversees the transplant system for the government is not managing the list properly and giving people a false sense of supply and demand.
"You can't inflate the numbers. You risk alienating people and having them not support organ donation because they say the system doesn't play fair," Caplan said.
"They're not putting people on a list to inflate a need, the need is there," said United Network for Organ Sharing President Dr. Tim Pruett.
The United Network for Organ Sharing, the group that runs the list, says many of the people on the list only become ineligible temporarily. And that far more people who actually need transplants do end up receiving them.
"18 people die a day waiting for organs. The overall thrust is that we're working against a clock. Our role is not to clear people off the list; our role is to get people transplants so they can live more normal lives," Pruett said.
A normal life for Lia is all this family could hope for.
" The only thing I would really like is for me and my daughter to leave this hospital together. Our family," Cirelli said.
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