Tag: organ donation
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Xenotransplantation—giving animal organs to humans
In the early 1990s a distinguished scientist predicted that within twenty years thousands of lives would be saved by xenotransplantation. His optimism was unfortunately premature and in America today more than 100,000 people are waiting to receive human hearts, livers, or kidneys. Yet despite false starts and disappointments, the dream of using animal organs in…
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The Lazarus phenomenon: When the dead return to life
Tom SeweNairobi, Kenya It is a few minutes after 2 AM. A middle-aged woman lays motionless on a table in a hospital emergency department with tubes protruding from multiple orifices. The relentless cardiac monitor screams its flat-line signal as the code-blue team pants, scrubs clinging to their sweaty chests after a phenomenal forty-five-minute cardiopulmonary resuscitation…
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Grit
Romalyn AnteWolverhampton, England My mother is right—my brother’s blood is getting dirtier. A nurse like me, she had read the result of his glomerular filtration rate, a test that measures how well the kidneys clean the blood. It had dropped below 15, an indication that his chronic renal failure was reaching its end stage. Some…
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Scarred for life
Shanda McCutcheonCalgary, Alberta, Canada Most mornings I wake and it does not seem like it happened at all. Still half asleep, I step under the cascading waters of a warm shower without even thinking about it. Life does not seem much different than it did a year ago, except that then I was embarking on…
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The color of organ markets
Howsikan KugathasanToronto, Ontario, Canada Nawaraj Pariyar from Nepal is promised thirty thousand dollars for “a piece of meat” that will grow back. Only later does he find out that he was duped twice. He received less than 1% of his promised money and that piece of meat was not any ordinary flesh: it was his…
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Death and the organ donor
Karen DyerUnited Kingdom Historically the “death debate” has been long and intensive, and the definition of death has evolved over the centuries. The ancient civilizations looked for an “absence of a heartbeat” and a “lack of breathing.” By the eighteenth century, however, fears of a misdiagnosis of death led doctors to suggest that the only…