… The truth behind organ donation & organ transplants
By Norm Barber
Preserving organs for harvesting conflicts with treatment for brain damage, the injury potential donors usually have. Preserving organs requires normal body temperature, higher blood pressure, increased fluid intake, blood thinning drugs but no brain protecting drugs like barbiturates.
Treating the donor’s brain injury requires lowered body temperature, usual blood pressure, brain protecting drugs like barbiturates, normal fluid intake, but no blood thinning drugs.
Once the transplant doctors and organ co-ordinators exert influence the patient’s treatment may change.
Donors also get the “brain death test” which one Professor of Neurology has said may cause rather than diagnose “brain death”. A patient being treated for brain injury should not get the “brain death test”.
Surgeons may remove the eyes, skin, tendons, ligaments, large veins, fascia, major and minor bones.The skull may be sawed in half to remove dura matter. How can this not disfigure the donor?
Donors failing to stipulate in detail what can be removed may be “cleaned out”.
They wait until loss of bodily reflexes. They turn off the breathing machine for ten minutes and stick a less effective air hose down the patient’s windpipe. If the patient doesn’t begin breathing without the machine then “brain death” is declared. Before this occurs the patient may display signs of asphyxia due to lack of oxygen.
The body is paralysed to stop it jumping about during harvesting. The dead donor’s heart is still beating. Blood pressure and heartbeat speed rise dramatically as the harvester makes the first cut from breastbone to groin.
Some anaesthetists say donors should be given anaesthetic since experts around the world can’t agree if the donor is dead or still alive and may still be feeling pain.
Religions generally support the idea of sacrifice and donation of body organs after death. The Pope of the Catholic Church defines this death as “the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem)”. Most countries including Australia, Great Britain and United States allow harvesting to begin before this stage of death is reached.
Religious leaders require that donors give “informed consent” but how many prospective donors know about the apnea “brain death” test, that the donor’s heart is still beating during harvesting and that the “dead” donor reacts to the surgeon’s knife in a similar manner to a healthy individual being cut open.
Everyone gets a financial benefit from the harvested organs and body parts except the donor. A body donated in the United States generates up to two million dollars of medical and cosmetic activity.
A liver transplant costs about $350,000. A government providing free liver transplants to its citizens may find it more profitable to sell this service to foreigners. The Queensland government in Australia was caught selling liver transplants to Japanese citizens.
Bones, tendons, ligaments, dura matter, veins, skin, and body parts used for medical and cosmetic purposes are sold to any hospital or clinic that pays the price. Poor people wait years for surgery while rich folk with their expensive insurance get immediate treatment at private hospitals. Subsequently richer people will get precedence over the donors’ body parts.
The fairer medical systems allocate vital organs such as heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas, and lungs to those considered best able to survive the anti-rejection drugs and limitations of a transplant organ.
Guidebooks produced for prospective organ recipient patients list the following as giving priority for an organ transplant1) the ability to hire nursing care after the transplant
2) the ability to purchase the best anti-rejection drugs and follow-up doctors
3) minimal problems with courts, police and government departments
These priorities naturally favour the rich.
Surgeons harvest organs from patients with strong and still beating hearts. Only 1% of donors die this way. Surgeons don’t want vital organs from donors who are completely dead and whose hearts have stopped. Therefore, only 1% of prospective donors donate vital organs. Most people can become eye, bone and skin donors.
Palestinians bury their dead within hours of being killed because the Israelis take their bodies and remove organs. Israelis regularly travel to Turkey for transplants of kidneys sold by Moldavians from the former Soviet Union. Rich Asians and Arabs regularly travel to India for transplants of kidneys purchased from poor people who then don’t get follow-up treatment if they become ill from the harvesting. A similar market exists in Latin and South America.
In China organ donation is a punishment. Prisoners are shot in the head creating the condition of “brain death”. Harvesting begins with their hearts still beating and they die during the organ removal process.
