'Organ Donors Should Be Paid' Says Top Doc

October 6, 2006

People should be paid for donating organs to help answer the large demand for transplants, says a top surgeon.

She said paying organ donors would also prevent exploitation of poor people.

Organ transplant specialist Amy Friedman said payments for live organ donation does not go against current ethical practice in healthcare and would help with the "desperate" need for organs.

Many people who agree to participate in medical research do so for financial reward, says the associate professor of surgery.

Prof Friedman, of Yale University School of Medicine, Connecticut, said: "If it is reasonable, legal, and ethically justified to motivate someone using monetary reward to participate in human research, then by extension the same person should be allowed a monetary inducement or reward for donating an organ."

The buying and selling of regenerative products such as human hair, blood and semen occurs and human eggs are now sought openly with a price offered for them -- payment is legal in the USA.

Prof Friedman says proper supervision of a transplant process would minimise potential medical and surgical harm and may be accomplished through a centralised, multi disciplinary panel with responsibility for determining standardised criteria for donors and recipients as well as a uniform fee.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, she says kidneys are covertly transplanted in third world countries at the moment from poorer people to wealthier recipients, with little evidence of the outcomes.

Prof Friedman added: "Bringing these activities out of the closet, by introducing governmental supervision and funding will provide equity for the poor, who will get equal access to such transplants."

She said: "Governments seem resistant to allowing live donors to benefit from their gift. But a legalised system could solve organ shortages and be both safer and fairer.

"The demand for life saving organ transplantation has so outpaced supply that waiting patients and transplant teams are desperate. Improved survival rates coupled with steady expansion of indications for transplantation make the organ shortage progressively severe; waiting times are now unbearably long.

"Lack of donors has led to some patients contracting with organ brokers to purchase a kidney from a living donor. Because payment for organs is illegal in most countries, people may travel to the donor;s homeland for the transplantation.

"Limited studies indicate possible exploitation of these paid donors, who may get minimal benefit from their purported financial compensation."

Prof Friedman added: "At the moment, kidneys are covertly transplanted in third world countries, from indigent donors into wealthy recipients. Bringing these activities out of the closet by introducing governmental supervision and funding will provide equity for the poor, who will get equal access to such transplants.

"It is appropriate living donors, indigent or wealthy, share in the tangible benefits of their ethical concern for others. Not doing so, effectively restricting the disadvantaged, is unreasonably disingenuous."

This article posted November 12, 2006.

'Organ Donors Should Be Paid' Says Top Doc

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