Impatient patients vex organ-Donor network

By Jordan Lite

Daily News Writer

July 31, 2005

Poster citing Shari Kurzrok's plight is held up in Union Square as Dahlia Aronson (center) uses a bullhorn to plead for help finding volunteers for a liver donation for the publicist.

After languishing for two years on the national waiting list for a kidney, Richard Miller has had enough. He's posted a tractor-trailer-sized billboard on a Buffalo highway, appealing to kindhearted drivers for a spare.

Miller's smiling face, embraced by his wife, Bonnie, and a message - "I need a kidney. Can you help?" - has generated more than 35 calls offering assistance since he mounted the ad Monday, he said.

Fed up with the 90,000-person waiting list for organs, a growing number of people are making public and often dramatic appeals for donors - on billboards, the Internet and in the news media - creating tension between desperate patients and those who run the country's transplant system.

On Monday, the New York Organ Donor Network accused friends of Shari Kurzrok, a 31-year-old Manhattan publicist, of employing tactics that had "elements of a coercion campaign," including allegedly "tracking" trauma victims in emergency rooms who might become potential liver donors.

A spokeswoman for the campaign, Kym White, said she knew of no one who was "tracking" patients or directly approaching their families, but conceded that "perhaps things had gone too far."

Such public solicitations are "making the system look corrupt and leaving a bad taste in people's mouths," said Dr. Jon Bromberg, chief of the Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center.

"What is very good about the system and must be preserved is that people feel that the system is fair," Bromberg said. "Even if you have resources, you can't buy your way to the top."

The system works according to a complex formula that considers who is sickest, who has been waiting longest for an organ and who is likely to become healthiest from a transplant.

"Public solicitation changes that dynamic and rewards people on the basis of other than clinically relevant information," said Dr. Mark Fox of the United Network for Organ Sharing, which opposes publicly soliciting for deceased donors.

Fox noted the case of Todd Krampitz, who last summer posted highway billboards in Houston seeking a liver. A deceased donor's family directed a liver to Krampitz. He died in April at 32, eight months after the transplant.

But Miller said Fox's argument isn't backed up by reality. Rather than altering the allocation formula, he said, getting an organ from outside the system improves the lot of the people on the waiting list.

"If there were enough to go around, no one would be complaining and no one would be dying on the list," said Miller, 52, of Lockport, N.Y.

After initial worries that recipients were illegally paying for organs from donors they met through ads, some hospitals have begun to perform transplants on these pairings.

In October, doctors in Denver conducted what was said to be the first organ transplant brokered online. The recipient, Robert Hickey, paid MatchingDonors.com about $900 for membership and picked up $5,000 in transportation and other costs for his kidney donor, Robert Smitty. A dozen members of the site have received transplants since then.

As critics like Bromberg remain troubled by the financial and psychological implications of public solicitation, the latest talk is of creating a new kind of registry - this one made up of living donors who wish to volunteer a kidney or lobe of their liver.

"If people are going to come off the waiting list, they have to make the parameters of finding a donor bigger," said Jeanette Ostrom of Jamestown, N.Y., who posted an online classified ad on behalf of her 33-year-old son, Paul Cardinale, who needs a kidney.

Copyright © 2005 Daily News, L.P

This article posted August 18, 2005.