Australians are helping fuel a predatory international transplant trade by travelling overseas to buy organs illegally.

The Transplantation Society says there are still Australians willing to ignore health and ethical considerations to source organs on the overseas market. (ABC News)

round 12,000 Germans are waiting for an organ donation. Some politicians think that a model where everyone is presumed to be a donor unless they have said otherwise could give a much-needed boost to organ donation. (Deutsche Welle)

Illegal organ harvesting has become worse under reforms put in place by the Chinese leadership to stop it, says a Canadian human rights lawyer. (Epoch Times)

A new trend has people sharing more than just their photographs on Facebook. But don’t get the wrong impression. (FOXNews)

Question of whether eggs should be harvested from woman on life support plunges specialists into tough terrain. (The Boston Globe)

Two non-governmental organisations asked the government to prioritise the protection of people’s health and the prevention of diseases that lead to organ failure instead of promoting the Philippines as an area for organ transplant. (Gulf News)

THE Welsh Assembly Government will attempt to change the law on organ donation within the next year, the Western Mail has learned. It is understood a legislative competence order will be put forward in the next few months to transfer the necessary powers to Wales. (WalesOnline)

Mei Leng Yew’s father has spent most of his adult life in Britain, but he still believes that blood doning is a high risk activity. (Guardian)

Over the past decade the Philippines has gained an international reputation as a hub for the illegal traffic in human organs from living donors, with some hospitals catering for wealthy foreign patients requiring kidney transplants. (MedIndia)

A suburban New York assemblyman whose daughter is a two-time kidney transplant recipient wants to flip New York’s organ-donation system on its head by presuming people are donors unless they indicate otherwise. (USA TODAY)

Journal of Medical Ethics (Volume 36, Issue 6, June 2010) is now available by subscription only.

Articles Include:

• “Requested Allocation of a Deceased Donor Organ: Laws and Misconceptions” by J.F. Douglad, and A.J. Cronin, 321.
• “‘(More) Trials and Tribulations’: The Effect of the EU Directive on Clinical Trials in Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, Five Years After Its Implementation” by Katy Robinson and Peter J.D. Andrews, 322-325.
• “Ethical Quandaries Posing as Conflicts of Interest” by Miguel Kottow, 328-332.
• “Eluana Englaro, Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Ethical Considerations on the Recent Right-to-Die Case in Italy” by Marco Luchetti, 333-335.
• “The Parents’ Ability to Take Care of Their Baby as a Factor in Decisions to Withhold or Withdraw Life-Prolonging Treatment in Two Dutch NICUs” by Sofia Moratti, 336-338.
• “A Theoretical Flaw in the Advance Market Commitment Idea” by Jorn Sonderholm, 339-343.
• “Evaluating End of Life Practices in Ten Brazilian Paediatric and Adult Intensive Care Units” by Jefferson Piva, Patricia Lago, Jairo Othero, Pedro Celiny Garcia, Renato Fiori, Humberto Fiori, Luiz Alexandre Borges, and Fernando S. Dias, 344-348.
• “Medical Decision-Making and Communication of Risks: An Ethical Perspective” by Christof Breitsameter, 349-352.
• “Therapeutic Privilege: Between the Ethics of Lying and the Practice of Truth” by Claude Richard, Yvette Lajeunesse, and Marie-Thérèse Lussier, 353-357.
• “Recruitment of Minority Ethnic Groups Into Clinical Cancer Research Trials to Assess Adherence to the Principles of the Department of Health Research Governance Framework: National Sources of Data and General Issues Arising from a Study in One Hospital Trust in England” by Sylvia Godden, Gareth Ambler, and Allyson M. Pollock, 358-362.
• “Clinician Gate-Keeping in Clinical Research is Not Ethically Defensible: An Analysis” by Kerith Sharkey, Julian Savulescu, Sanchia Aranda, and Penelope Schofield, 363-366.
• “Off-Trial Access to Experimental Cancer Agents for the Terminally Ill: Balancing the Needs of Individuals and Society” by Manik Chahai, 367-370.
• “The Ethical Professional As Endangered Person: Blog Notes on Doctor-Patient Relationships” by Tom Koch and Sarah Jones, 371-374.
  

The shortage of organ donors means an estimated 100 Australians die on waiting lists each year. Could xenotransplantation from genetically engineered animals fill the gap? ( ABC Science)

More people are saving the lives of family members and friends by giving them an organ, figures show. (Guardian)

This paper investigates the question of what an organ is from a phenomenological perspective. Proceeding from the phenomenology of being-in-the-world developed by Heidegger in Being and Time and subsequent works, it compares the being of the organ with the being of the tool. It attempts to display similarities and differences between the embodied nature of the organs and the way tools of the world are handled. It explicates the way tools belong to the totalities of things of the world that are ready to use and the way organs belong to the totality of a bodily being able to be in this very world. In so doing, the paper argues that while the organ is in some respects similar to a bodily tool, this tool is nonetheless different from the tools of the world in being tied to the organism as a whole, which offers the founding ground of the being of the person. However, from a phenomenological point of view, the line between organs and tools cannot simply be drawn by determining what is inside and outside the physiological borders of the organism. We have, from the beginning of history, integrated technological devices (tools) in our being-in-the-world in ways that make them parts of ourselves rather than parts of the world (more organ- than tool-like), and also, more recently, have started to make our organs more tool-like by visualising, moving, manipulating, and controlling them through medical technology. In this paper, Heidegger’s analysis of organ, tool, and world-making is confronted with this development brought about by contemporary medical technology. It is argued that this development has, to a large extent, changed the phenomenology of the organ in making our bodies more similar to machines with parts that have certain functions and that can be exchanged. This development harbours the threat of instrumentalising our bodily being but also the possibility of curing or alleviating suffering brought about by diseases which disturb and destroy the normal functioning of our organs. [Premium (Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics)]

A friend gave a kidney to me, but we can’t always rely on goodwill. That’s why we must properly reward donors. (Times Online)

In last week’s Jewish News, Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet discussed his view of the problems with organ donation in Judaism. I fear he may have left people with an inaccurate impression of how it is arranged and the Jewish view towards it. He suggested that doctors “might remove [an organ] while you’re ‘medically dead’ even if not actually dead”. (TJ Leader)

Governments should issue tax credits for organ donations to ensure that bereaved families honor donor’s wishes, says an ethicist and visiting fellow at the Université de Montréal in Québec. (CMAJ)

Last June, the Empire State Stem Cell Board caused a stir by allotting public funds for stem cell research in the state of New York. It permitted paying up to $10,000 dollars per cycle for egg retrieval for research purposes. This decision is best understood in light of the difficulty that stem cell scientists have in finding women to provide eggs without payment. New York’s policy contradicts regulatory standards in many other countries, as well as in other states. (Bioethics Forum)

Compared to organ transplants, bone marrow donations need to be even more genetically similar to their recipients. Though there are exceptions, the vast majority of successful matches take place between donors and patients of the same ethnic background. Since all the immune system’s cells come from bone marrow, a transplant essentially introduces a new immune system to a person. Without genetic similarity between the donor and the patient, the new white blood cells will attack the host body. In an organ transplant, the body can reject the organ, but with marrow, the new immune system can reject the whole body. (TIME)

Pakistan has passed a new law banning the donation of human organs to all but the closest of relatives. The law is aimed at protecting the country’s poor and vulnerable, who can be duped into parting with a kidney for a few hundred dollars. (Al Jazeera)

Three metaphors appear to guide contemporary thinking about organ transplantation. Although the gift is the sanctioned metaphor for donating organs, the underlying perspective from the side of the state, authorities and the medical establishment often seems to be that the body shall rather be understood as a resource. The acute scarcity of organs, which generates a desperate demand in relation to a group of potential suppliers who are desperate to an equal extent, leads easily to the gift’s becoming, in reality, not only a resource, but also a commodity. In this paper, the claim is made that a successful explication of the gift metaphor in the case of organ transplantation and a complementary defence of the ethical primacy of the giving of organs need to be grounded in a philosophical anthropology which considers the implications of embodiment in a different and more substantial way than is generally the case in contemporary bioethics. I show that Heidegger’s phenomenology offers such an alternative, with the help of which we can understand why body parts could and, indeed, under certain circumstances, should be given to others in need, but yet are neither resources nor properties to be sold. The phenomenological exploration in question is tied to fundamental questions about what kind of relationship we have to our own bodies, as well as about what kind of relationship we have to each other as human beings sharing the same being-in-the-world as embodied creatures. [Premium (Journal of Bioethical Inquiry)]